[Sca-cooks] Turkeys ARE Period!

[Terry Decker]

There was quite a bit of confusion as to where things came from.  Fuchs 
(1541) refers to chili peppers as Indische and Calcuttisha Pfeffer and maize 
as Turkishe Korn (if I got the spellings correct).  That beats out Gerard by 
half a century.

In the case of maize, it probably came into Europe on Columbus's first 
voyage and was transferred to the Ottoman Empire via Northern Italy (read 
Genoa or Venice).  The Turks were early adopters and European travellers who 
encountered these new crops in Asia Minor may have been rightly confused 
about their actual origin.  In the case of maize and chili peppers, it may 
have been the Turks who introduced them to Central Europe.

There is also the consideration that tying foods to Turkey or India may have 
initially been a marketing ploy.  Columbus found the New World in 1492. 
Around 1501, Amerigo Vespucci floated the idea that South America was a 
separate continent from Asia.  And in 1521, Magellan took off on the voyage 
that would prove the Americas were not Asia.  So even if the original 
thought was the East and West Indies were the same islands, it didn't last 
long.

Bear


>I think you are thinking of maize as the new world food that was thought to
> have come from Turkey. Gerard refers to it as Turkey corn And clarifies to
> the reader that it does not come from Asia minor which is the domain of
> Turks but through Spain from the Americans.
> De
>
> -----Original Message-----
>> Johann, isn't there also some reason to think that the Turkey came in
>> through the trade routes from the middle East and thought of as native to
>> India or Turkey?
>>
>> Regina,
>
> I'm not Johann, but I can answer that with an almost definitive "No." 
> While
> several things are thought to have come into Europe from North America via
> Asia, the connection is the Spanish trade between the Philippines and the
> West Coast of Mexico and South America, the Manila galleons.  (snip)
> Bear