[Sca-cooks] Spanish Pepper?

lilinah at earthlink.net lilinah at earthlink.net
Tue Sep 13 23:33:51 PDT 2011


Honour Horne-Jaruk wrote:
> At my annual "siege cooking" contest at Pennsic this year, one of  
> the contestants included dishes spiced with "Spanish pepper" - a  
> Capsicum pepper, not a Piper species- which she insisted went back  
> to Roman times and was ironclad-documentable to our time period.
> I said I didn't agree and refused those dishes entry. The  
> contestants were very upset with me.
>
> I must preface by saying all new world spices were forbidden because  
> I'm allergic/hypersensitive to them, and Capsicum peppers are high  
> on that list.
>
> However, I now beg the Collected Wisdom of sca-cooks to help me  
> figure out why my contestant thought Capsicum peppers were around in  
> Roman times. Is there some kind of Piper which was grown in Spain by  
> the Romans, or is the whole thing out of whack, or what?

Yeow! Capsicums are strictly New World. The Spanish brought them back as exotic oddities, but didn't really use them. They appear to have gotten into the Ottoman Empire by the 17th century. Someone else pointed out long peppers (piper longum) which capsicums perhaps were thought to resemble, but capsicums in Roman times? No way! 

Phlip wrote:
SNIP
>I still feel that the black-eyed peas were OOP. Can someone go back
>over that? I think we could use turkey more easily than black-eyed
>peas.

Depends on what culture's cuisine you're cooking. The black eyed pea is a subspecies of the cowpea (Vigna unguiculata). Cowpeas were cultivated in West Africa 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, and closely associated with the cultivation of sorghum and millet. They spread out from there. They are acknowledged in SCA-period Arabic cuisine, where they are called lubiya, and in SCA-period Indian cuisine as well - they are called lobiya in the 16th c.  Ain-i Akbari. This may possibly be confusing because the words lubiya and lobia is now also used for New World green beans and for New World dried beans (phaseolus).

I can't say i've seen them in any European cuisine, but i haven't been looking for them there.
-- 
Urtatim [that's err-tah-TEEM]
the persona formerly known as Anahita



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