However, since we are talking 'standard spice mixes', as well as garam masala there is of course the classic Chinese five-spice powder, 五香粉 ...  a spice mixture of five (sometimes more) spices used predominantly in almost all branches of Chinese cuisines and Vietnamese cuisine. The five flavours of the spices (sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and pungent) refer to the five traditional Chinese elements of classic cuisine, and so while there are variants, a common mix might be: star anise; cloves; Chinese cinnamon; Sichuan pepper; and fennel seeds. I can easily obtain a version of Chinese Five-Spice powder in local supermarkets here in France - but Indian garam masala rather less so (reflecting history, of course). Although 'curry powder' and 'curry sauce', although both made rather mild to suit French palates, are increasingly available.

Meles meles wrote:

The use of hot spices is not mentioned which reflects the limited use of chili in India at that time - chili plants had only been introduced into India (from Central and South America) around the late 16th century and initially were only popular in southern India.

Yes - the fact that chillies were being used in European kitchens decades before they were being used in Asian ones is something which seems to go counter to the popular understanding today regarding the characteristics of 'European food' and 'Asian food'. Asia certainly had Black pepper, White pepper and Sichuan pepper etc. Pepper, however, was already available in Europe at least as early as the 1st century BC and probably a lot earlier than that. But to think that chillies reached Copenhagen before they reached Canton, reached Bruges before they reached Bangkok and reached Dublin before they reached Delhi, is truly food for thought.

Vizzer wrote:

But to think that chillies reached Copenhagen before they reached Canton, reached Bruges before they reached Bangkok and reached Dublin before they reached Delhi, is truly food for thought.

I think that might be overstating the situation a bit. The detail of how capsicums/chili peppers; the knowledge of how to cultivate them and use them in cooking; and how all this came to be transported around the world, is still uncertain. Furthermore while chili peppers and their seeds seem to have travelled globally soon after their 'discovery' in the Americas, in many places it took many decades, if not centuries, for their use to become accepted and reasonably common-place. In Britain chili peppers - whether fresh, dried whole, or ground as powder - were not a common culinary ingredient, even amongst high society, much before the 1750s, and this might well be about the same time that it was only just becoming accepted in the courtly palace kitchens of northern Indian potentates and princes. That is of course in contrast to southern India, which had a long culinary tradition of spicey cuisine based on the plentiful use of black pepper and ginger, and where chilies had been readily accepted into the local cuisine soon after they had been introduced by the Portuguese in the early 16th century. But I'm really not sure about the timeline and detail of how chilis came to be accepted into Indian cuisine.

Anyhow the first Old World encounter with chilies/capsicums/bell-peppers, or whatever we choose to call them, was when Columbus encountered the plants on his first voyage to the West Indies in 1492. The indiginous people called the plant 'aji' or 'axi', but Columbus, convinced that he had landed in India, referred to the spicy plants as pimientos (peppers), after the black pepper that he so desperately sought in the Indies. It would be after the Spanish conquest of Mexico that it acquired the name chili, after it's name, 'chilli', in Nahuatl, the Aztec language. Columbus's physician on his second voyage, Diego Alvarez Chanca, brought the first chili peppers and seeds back to Spain where he wrote about their culinary and medicinal uses. Over the following decades more seeds/plants undoubtedly made they way back from the New World but in Spain they remained, at least initially, simply a botanical curiosity cultivated in a few monastery gardens.

The Spanish trade with the New World in the first part of the 16th century was quite limited compared to the Portuguese who secretly continued to trade with the 'Spanish-owned' part of the Americas despite the Treaty of the Tordesillas with had assigned most of the region to Spain in 1494. Following Vasco de Gama's discovery of a sea route from Europe, around the Cape of Good Hope to India, in 1498, Goa, midway down the western seaboard of the Indian subcontinent fell to the Portuguese under the leadership of Afonzo de Albuquerque. Located on the spice-rich Malabar Coast, the strategic city established Portuguese control over the Europe/Asian spice trade. The local cuisine already used a lot of pungent black pepper and biting ginger, and readily adopted the new spice, which was being cultivated there by the 1520s. Meanwhile New World goods and foods, including chilis, were funneled along the expanding Portuguese shipping routes as the Portuguese empire grew: Brazil, islands of East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, as well as India. Additionally the Portuguese sea lanes to the Mollucas and Indonesia meant they met up with Chinese, Gujarati and Arabic traders, who in turn were able to add New World crops to their own existing trade bounties.

Portuguese sailors landed at the mouth of the Pearl River in China in 1516 and established a trading post there with the approval of the Chinese. By mid-16th century this trading post had grown into the large port city of Macao, from where it is likely chili peppers spread into south-east China (until all trade was banned in 1547) and to Japan where chilies had first arrived in 1542 with some Portuguese missionaries.  Another route into China was from Diu, which juts out of the north-west coast of India and which was securely held by the Portuguese after they'd ousted the Sultan of Gujarat in 1536. The city’s location made it an important port on the trade routes of the Arabian sea as well as another route inland toward the Ganges, up the Brahmaputra River, and across the Himalayas to Yunnan and Sichuan. From these same Portuguese colonies along the Indian west coast, chili peppers also found their way through Persia, Mesopotamia and into Turkey.

Despite a European 'discovery' of the Americas, chili peppers spread throughout Europe in rather circuitous fashion. Venice was the centre of the spice and Oriental trade of central Europe and from there the trade route went across central Europe to Antwerp, or by sea to London, although both cities also received Far Eastern goods from India, Africa, and Lisbon direct via Portugal. It was along these avenues that chili peppers travelled into much of Europe. They were in Italy by 1535,  Germany by 1542, the Balkans before 1569 and Moravia by 1585. Chili peppers were known in England before 1538, having likely arrived by the London Turkey Merchants returning from Constantinople and Venice or, given the relatively early date, directly from Portugal itself. Certainly the English botanist, John Gerard, describes the capsicum pepper (he calls it "ginnie or indian pepper" despite it coming from neither Guinea or India) alongside tomatoes, maize, courges and other New World plants in his 'Herball' of 1597, but whether they were regularly cultivated or even eaten at this date is more doubtful.

It is logical to assume that chili peppers got to North America straight up from Mexico however it is by no means certain. By the 17th century capsicum peppers were certainly cultivated as far north as what would become Texas but is seems that they were found nowhere north of this until after colonization by Northern Europeans. Having been introduced into West African cuisine via Portuguese colonies and trade routes, the chili played such a crucial part of the African diet that slave traders carried large quantities with them on transatlantic voyages and plantations grew them in gardens for kitchen use. Accordingly the chili did not take root in North America until the plantation system and African slavery were instituted.

Europeans, with the exception of the Ottoman controlled Balkans and Hungary, did not make much use of chilli peppers, until the Napoleonic blockade cut off their supply of spices and they turned to Balkan paprika as a substitute. This was the 'chyan' (ie cayenne) of English late-eighteenth century recipe books, such as here in 'The Lady's Assistant for Regulating and Supplying Her table', by Charlotte Mason (1777) and note how, because it is spiced with nutmeg and cayenne, it is still described as being, à la Portugal.

Beef a-la-mode de Portugal,
TAKE a ſmall rump of beef, fry the thin part of it brown in butter; make a ſtuffing with ſome onions, boiled cheſnuts, an anchovy, ſome chyan pepper, ſalt, and nutmeg; ſluff the thick part of the rump, and ſtew it in ſome ſtrong beef-gravy till it is tender, then take it up; keep it hot, ſtrain off the gravy, put to it ſome browning, (for made diſhes) ſome pickled Cucumbers, capers chopped, and a little lemon-juice; give it a boil, cut the fried meat in two, lay it on each ſide, and pour the gravy over it.

Chilies, dried whole or ground as a powder, only start to become a regular, if rather limited, part of British cuisine in the 19th century and particularly with the consolidation of British rule in India after 1858 and the increasing taste for curries and spicy relishes amongst returning colonial officials, soldiers, engineers and entrepreneurs. For example from 'Modern Cookery for Private Families' by Eliza Acton (1845);

BENGAL CURRIE POWDER. No. 1.
Mix thoroughly the following ingredients after they have been separately reduced to the finest powder and passed through a fine hair or lawn sieve:-
6 oz. coriander seed.
3 oz. black pepper.
1 oz. cummin-seed.
1 oz. fenugreek-seed.
1 oz. cayenne pepper.
3 oz. best pale turmeric.
Set the powder before the fire to dry, and turn it often; then withdraw it, let it become cold, and bottle it immediately. Keep it closely corked.

... or from 'The Book of Household Management', by Isabella Beeton (1861);

CHILI VINEGAR.
INGREDIENTS: 50 fresh red English chilies, 1 pint of vinegar.
Mode: Pound or cut the chilies in half, and infuse them in the vinegar for a fortnight, when it will be fit for use. This will be found an agreeable relish to fish, as many people cannot eat it without the addition of an acid and cayenne pepper.


PS : In the above I've rather sloppily used the words chili, cayenne, capsicum, bell pepper, pimento, paprika almost interchangeably and indeed they are all basically the same plant, however one should be aware that there are actually five distinct capsicum species that have been domesticated (as well as others that, in S America, are still regularly gathered from the wild). The chilis that the Spanish encountered in Mexico had been developed from C. annuum a native of central America north of the Panama ithsmus; while the peppers Columbus found growing on the Carribbean islands, though probably also C. annuum might possibly have been C. chinese - so called through later scientific confusion about where they originally came from. C. chinese naturally grows in north-eastern South America north of the Amazon basin and in lands bordering the Caribbean/Atlantic, including around the town of Cayenne - although note 'cayenne pepper' itself is actually a cultivated variety of C. annuum, ie the same as chili. C. pubescens is the indigenous pepper of the Andes which was grown by the Incas, along with several other wild forms which are still gathered and eaten locally. Across South America there were also two other distinct capsicum pepper species that are still widely cultivated at least locally: C. baccatum and C. frutescens. All of these pepper species are notable for their spicey heat (it's a chemical defense against the seeds being eaten by mammals - birds, which help to disperse the seeds, are unaffected) and it was only in the mid-19th century that growers in Hungary developed the milder, sweet-tasting bell pepper varieties that are common today, again from plants derived from C.annuum stock. Courtesy of the Portuguese and their wide-reaching trade routes it is C. annuum that is the pepper most commonly cultivated world-wide, but all five pepper species are still grown commercially. Furthermore the different pepper species, although generally self-pollinating, will hybridise with each other, to give all the different varieties of shape, colour and spicey-heat grown today.

Meles meles wrote:

Furthermore while chili peppers and their seeds seem to have travelled globally soon after their 'discovery' in the Americas, in many places it took many decades, if not centuries, for their use to become accepted and reasonably common-place.

France was certainly not unaware of the existence of chilies as far back as the 16th century, furthermore she had her own colonies in the Caribbean and South America - Cayenne is after all the capital of French Guiana - as well as possessions in southern India, where chilies were readily adopted into the local, spicey cuisine (France held Pondicherry/Puducherry in India until 1962). And yet outside of Vietnamese, Middle Eastern and Maghrebi communities in France - and also regions where the curry-loving Brits have their second homes - spicey food is not, even now, a common part of everyday French cooking:  fresh chili peppers are often difficult to find in supermarkets (so I grow my own) and indeed the heat of chilies in food is often viewed with a degree of mistrust at best.

Once, when my Wallon mother-in-law was visiting, we - that's my partner and I, it wasn't entirely my fault - cooked a simple Tex-mex supper of chicken fajitas: everyone to help themselves from the dish of chicken in tomato sauce, with tortillas, guacamole, sour cream, grated cheese, salad etc. - but it didn't go down well. Apart from the fact that she pointedly insisted on using a knife and fork even to eat the guacamole, her face when she tasted the very mildly spiced chicken suggested we were tying to poison her, and she refused to eat it.  As I say chili spiced foods are still rarely acceptable or even common in mainstream domestic cooking.

I was acutely reminded of this today as I was experimenting for an easy dish to offer vegan guests: bean burritos. They are easy to make and the basic filling can be done in advance and frozen; I can readily get vacuum packed tortillas here perhaps because I'm close to Spain; and then all it needs is guacamole, plus some sour cream and maybe grated cheese if you want, or just a simple side salad - easy! But while experimenting with the basic mix and trying to boost the flavour I was ever mindful not to make it even the slightest bit hot-chili-spicey.

Regarding the availabliity of chilies in 18th century England, it would appear that they were commercially grown there since parson James Woodforde's diaries (spanning the years 1759-1802 and much later published as 'The Diary of a Country Parson') include the following recipe (though I'm not sure for which year).

Home-made Cayenne Pepper, of superior Flavour.
Those who desire to obtain good Cayenne Pepper, free from adulteration and poisonous colouring matter, should make it of English chilies. By so doing they half the heat of the foreign. A hundred large chilies, costing only two shillings, will produce about two ounces of cayenne - thus the superior home-made is as cheap as the commonest red pepper. The following is the way to make it:—Take away the stalks, and put the pods into a colander ; set it before the fire for about twelve hours, by which time they will be dry. Then pour them into a mortar, with one-fourth their weight in salt, and pound and rub them till they are as fine as possible; sift through a little muslin, and then pound the residue, and sift again.

As he calls them them 'English chilies' I assume they were grown in England - and there's certainly no practical reason why not - I find that hot chili-type peppers grow much easier than sweet bell peppers, although as he says they might not have the same firery heat of chilies grown where the summers are longer and hotter.

MM, of course I have it all from the bottle:



but sparked by your statement that their is certainly no reason why they could not grow in England, and I suppose then certainly in your neck of the woods there near Spain., I did a quick research for here in the Low Countries
and indeed: a complete course...
https://www.allezadenkopen.nl/blog/cayennepeper-kweken-stappenplan-hoe-ga-je-te-werk/
But perhaps i will push the neighbour , who is much more interested in all that horticulture...

But if that counts for "chilies", we eat many times "papricas" as this noon...two papricas that I cut in four halves, clean the inside and fill with some 100 gr mincemeat each, pepper and salt on it and olive oil, in the oven in a fireproof scale for some 25 min. 225 C°. One former cook from the innercircle says that I have to do it on 170 C° and longer at least one hour...but I haven't the patience for it...1 1/2 at noon for the two partners and 1/2 for me in the evening...

PS: As you said I put the chives in a pot away from the eventual polution with my herbicide and it does it wonderful. Each time some cut for the meal from the pot near the backdoor. Thanks MM for the hint.

Kind regards, Paul.

There's another spice that, despite not being particularly exotic nor restricted to just a few far-flung tropical islands, is still even today, very expensive: saffron.

As a spice saffron comes from the vivid crimson stigma of the saffron flower. Each flower produces three, thread-like, stigma which together yield an average per flower of just 30 milligrams of fresh saffron or 7 mg once dried. Accordingly to get one kilogram of dried saffron requires well over 100,000 flowers, which would typically occupy a cultivated area roughly equivalent to two football pitches. Separating the delicate stigma from the flower petals is labour-intensive work that has to be done entirely by hand (often by women and children). Accordingly saffron is very expensive with wholesale prices sometimes reaching 25€ a gram, which means it can often be more expensive, by weight, than gold.



The saffron plant is a sterile clone which can only be propagated from bulb offsets as genetically they are incapable of producing fertile seed. It is thought to have originated naturally from the autumn-flowering Crocus cartwrightianus somewhere in Greece, Anatolia, the Levant, Mesopotamia or Iran, but in antiquity it was already widely cultivated all around the Mediterranean, the Middle East and eastwards through Iran and Afghanistan to northern districts of the Indian sub-continent, both as a culinary spice and as a dye. In Europe saffron has been known since Roman times but as with many spices interest in it really only became widespread following the cultural exchanges resulting from the Crusades. European demand for saffron further surged during the period of the Black Death as it was seen as something of a universal panacea. Such was the demand, coupled with the exorbitant prices demanded by merchants, that it started to be cultivated in Europe even being grown quite extensively in England, particularly in the drier east of the country around Saffron Walden, hence the name (the town had originally been known as Chipping, ie market, Walden). 

Saffron is not a particularly difficult plant to cultivate. I grow it in the south of France and right now (late October) the plants are just starting to flower and so produce saffron. As well as providing an otherwise very expensive ingredient for the kitchen they also provide a bit of floral interest just when most other flowers are starting to die off - albeit that the individual saffron blooms only last a couple of days once you remove the stigma and obviously somewhat less if you harvest the whole flower as soon as it opens.

I grow my saffron in large tubs of rich compost which I alternate through the year with spicy chili-type peppers. The saffron bulbs I plant out in early October to flower later in the month (the flowers come up before the leaves) and then the bulbs fatten up over winter. When the saffron has died back around mid April, I lift the bulbs (easily done when they are grown in tubs) and store them dry in a cool, dark cellar, replanting the tubs with small chili pepper plants that I will have started from seed in February. By early October these peppers should be ready for harvesting (remembering to keep some of the seed for next year) which is when the saffron bulbs should be just starting to sprout, and so the pepper plants can be pulled up and the pots replanted with saffron bulbs. By spring each saffron bulb will have produced lots of little extra bulblets which are too small to flower in their first year, so I plant only the very biggest ones in the pots; all the rest get planted into the lawn where i hope they will eventually become naturalised. I just have to be a bit careful to keep the naturalising saffron crocuses well away from other clumps of lilac/mauve autumn-flowering crocus as many of these others are toxic. Anyway that's what works for me to give two high-value crops each year from the same small space. However I admit that even with ten tubs of saffron crocus I only get enough dried saffron each year for maybe half a dozen meals of paella, although at least I can be confident that my saffron isn't adulterated with much cheaper turmeric, or worse, as a lot of powdered 'saffron' being sold often is.

Well the received wisdom is that Croydon, as well as the more obvious Saffron Walden, derives its name from the cultivation of the saffron crocus.

"The saffron plant is a sterile clone which can only be propagated from bulb offsets as genetically they are incapable of producing fertile seed."
I don't really understand then how they could grow without human intervention which presumably they did to begin with. I may have said in another thread that I read a book by Colin Tudge about trees and their evolution and wondered afterwards how, if a species can evolve once, why it couldn't re-evolve if it became extinct, but that doesn't seem to be the case, or if it is, not in the lifetime of humanity.
I feel this post might look odd since after I copied and pasted the quotation, it went into an odd mode. (No, now that I see it on the screen, it is just the same as usual. Ah but what it hasn't done is put the quote in quotation marks so I will add them now.

I'm far from being an expert in these matters (I did physics and chemistry) but as I understand it the saffron crocus came about through a natural mutation in the chromosomes of the wild crocus species. This mutation rendered the plant sterile, in that it could not produce seed, but as with many bulbous plants (daffodils, tulips, hyacinths etc.) the plant still produced side bulbs which in turn could grow as independent plants. In this way a single bulb could eventually give rise to large spreading clumps of plants, all of which would be identical clones as they were not propagated by seed. Presumably the first saffron crocus plants multiplied naturally in this way, although as you say they were soon being assisted by human intervention, with the bulblets being deliberately broken off and planted out in fresh soil to get more saffron-yielding plants. I can't find out what it was that first encouraged humans to cultivate this particular strain of crocus rather than the fertile wild one, but it was probably because of something like them producing more saffron per flower when compared to the wild plants (perhaps being unable to produce seed meant the stigma tended to be bigger, but that's just a guess).

An alternative explanation for how the crocus plant came to be is that Crocus (Κρόκος), the mortal companion of Hermes, was accidentally killed by the god in a game of discus when he unexpectedly stood up. As the unfortunate youth's blood dripped on the soil the first saffron flowers burst forth. Another lad that got fatally biffed on the bonce by a discus was Hyacithus (Ὑάκινθος), the lover of Apollo, who, during a discus-throwing game chased after the discus thrown by Apollo. But the discus hit the ground and bounced back hitting Hyacinthus on the head fatally wounding him ... and from Hyacinth's spilled blood the hyacinth flower sprang up.

The Elizabethan and Jacobean historian William Camden was the son of a dyer and this is evident in his writings. For instance, he was fascinated by the contemporary Irish fashion for wearing baggy, bright yellow shirts. In Britannia (1607), his geographical history of the British Isles, he writes in a chapter on Irish customs:

Ex corticibus arborum quas alders vocant Angli nigras vestes inficiunt, utuntur etiam sambucinis baccis ad lanas flavas inficiendas. Ramis, cortice, et foliis populi arboris contusis laxa indusia ista crocea quae iam nullo fere sunt in usu efficiunt, cumque cortice arbuti sylvestris et sale crocum adhibent. Quae vero tingunt non tam igne longo coquunt quam inter alia frigidae humanae urinae aliquot dies immergunt, ut color flavus sit pertinacior.

From the bark of trees which the English call alders they dye their clothes black. They also use elderberries to dye wool yellow. The branches, bark, and leaves of the poplar tree are crushed to make their loose shirts yellow, using a dying method which employs strawberry tree bark, salt and saffron. Whatever is being dipped, however, is not boiled long over a fire but is immersed among other things in cold human urine for several days so that the fastness of the yellow colour holds.

In his Annals of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth he wrote of the visit of the Ulster chieftain John O’Neill to Elizabeth’s court in 1562:

Ex Hibernia iam venerat Shanus O-Neal, ut quod ante annum promiserat, praestaret, cum securigero Galloglassorum satellitio, capitibus nudis, crispatis cincinnis dependentibus, camisiis flavis croco vel humana urina infectis, manicis largioribus, tuniculis brevioribus, et larcernis villosis; quos Angli non minori tunc admiratione, quam hodie Chinenses et Americanos, prosequebantur.

Out of Ireland now came John O’Neill, which a year before he had promised to do, surrounded by axe-wielding gallowglasses, bare-headed, curly hair hanging loose, yellow shirts dyed with saffron or human urine, flared cuffs, short tunics, and fleece coats; which the English marveled at then as would be the same effect today with Chinese and Americans.

Note how in both excerpts Camden is unsure of just how much saffron was used to create these vivid Irish shirts and how much of it was down to urine. The reason for this uncertainty probably stems from the fact that the use of saffron dye in clothing had actually been outlawed in Ireland by Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII. This was in 1536 following the rebellion by the Earl of Kildare, ‘Silken’ Thomas FitzGerald, who (as his nickname suggests) was partial to the wearing of saffron-dyed silk frills for both himself and his henchmen. Henry’s sumptuary reprisal forbade anyone in the country to ‘weare any shirt, smock, kerchor, bendel, neckerchour, mocket of linen cappe coloured, or dyed with Saffron’. Just how verifiable or enforceable this edict was, however, is another matter. The subsequent flaunting of saffron attire in Elizabeth’s own court by O’Neill suggests not very.