The chilli arrived recently, and rewrote several cuisines

Chillies are native to the Americas, where they had been cultivated for thousands of years. They reached Europe after 1492 and moved from there across the world with astonishing speed, carried along Portuguese and Spanish trade routes.

Within roughly a century, chillies were established in West Africa, India, Southeast Asia, China and Korea. Within two, they had become defining ingredients in cuisines that had existed for millennia without them.

The speed is the striking part. A new ingredient arrived and was absorbed so thoroughly that within a few generations nobody could imagine the food without it.

Why it took so fast

It grows almost anywhere. Chillies are easy, productive, tolerate poor soil and can be grown by a household in a pot. Unlike black pepper, which requires specific tropical conditions and a long establishment period, a chilli plant produces in a season.

It replaced an expensive import. Black pepper and other pungent spices were costly and traded over long distances. Chilli delivered heat locally and cheaply, and it did so for the poorest households.

It slotted into existing frameworks. Cuisines that already used pungency — long pepper, black pepper, mustard, ginger, Sichuan pepper — had a place ready for it. The dishes did not have to be reinvented; an ingredient was substituted and then amplified.

It preserved well. Dried chillies keep for a long time, transport easily and can be ground.

What it displaced

In South Asia, long pepper and black pepper had been the principal sources of heat. Chilli did not eliminate them and it did take over a large share of the role, and it did so at a fraction of the cost.

In Sichuan cooking, chilli combined with the existing Sichuan pepper rather than replacing it, producing the numbing-and-hot combination that now defines the cuisine. That combination is younger than a great deal of what surrounds it.

In Korea, chilli became central to kimchi and to the fermented pastes that anchor the cuisine. Kimchi predates chilli by a long way — the earlier versions were salt-fermented without it — and the red kimchi that is now the default is a relatively recent development.

The other arrivals

Chilli was not alone. The same exchange moved a set of American crops that reshaped agriculture across the Old World.

Potatoes, which became a staple across northern Europe and substantially increased the calories available per acre — with consequences including population growth and, where dependence became total, catastrophic vulnerability to crop failure.

Maize, which spread across Africa, southern Europe and Asia. Adopted without the associated processing technique of nixtamalisation, which makes niacin available, it produced deficiency disease in populations that relied on it heavily — a case where a crop travelled and the knowledge required to use it safely did not.

Tomatoes, which took considerably longer to be accepted in Europe, being regarded with suspicion for around two centuries. Italian cooking without tomato is a real historical period, not a thought experiment.

Cassava, which became a major staple across sub-Saharan Africa, and which requires processing to remove cyanogenic compounds — knowledge that did travel with it in many cases, and did not in all.

Peanuts, cacao, vanilla, squash, beans and others.

Movement in the other direction brought wheat, rice, sugar cane, coffee, citrus and livestock to the Americas, along with diseases that devastated Indigenous populations. The exchange was not symmetrical in its consequences.

The general lesson about "traditional" food

Every cuisine is a snapshot of a long process of borrowing.

The dishes people are most protective of are frequently built on ingredients that arrived recently. Tomato sauce in Italy, paprika in Hungary, chilli in Sichuan, potatoes in Ireland, cassava in West Africa, peanut in the same region — all are foundational to cuisines that are older than the ingredient.

This is worth holding onto when authenticity arguments arise. Cuisines are not preserved specimens. They are what people cook, and they change when something better or cheaper becomes available.

What makes a tradition is not the age of the ingredients but the accumulated technique — how the thing is used, what it is combined with, what the meal structure is, and the enormous body of judgement about proportion and timing that a cuisine represents.

A cook in Sichuan in 1500 and one in 1700 were doing recognisably the same thing with different plants. The continuity is in the hands.