Chili peppers originated in the Americas and spread to Asia and other regions through maritime exchange from the 16th century onward. Many familiar spicy dishes therefore have ingredients with a transoceanic history.
Before chilies arrived, people also used pungent ingredients such as ginger and pepper. The history of spicy food is broader than the history of chili peppers.
Origins
Capsicum plants originated in modern-day Peru and Bolivia, and have been a part of human diets since about 7,500 BC. They are one of the oldest cultivated crops in the Americas. Chili peppers were cultivated in east-central Mexico some 6,000 years ago, and independently across different locations in the Americas including highland Peru and Bolivia, central Mexico, and the Amazon. They were among the first self-pollinating crops cultivated in those areas.
Peru has the highest diversity of cultivated Capsicum; it is a center of diversification where varieties of all five domesticates were introduced, grown, and consumed in pre-Columbian times. The largest diversity of wild Capsicum peppers is consumed in Bolivia. Bolivian consumers distinguish two basic forms: ulupicas, species with small round fruits including C. eximium, C. cardenasii, C. eshbaughii, and C. caballeroi landraces; and arivivis with small elongated fruits including C. baccatum var. baccatum and C. chacoense varieties.
Distribution to Europe
In 1493, Diego Álvarez Chanca accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to the West Indies. Upon returning to Spain with chili peppers, Chanca became the first European to document their medicinal uses in the Old World, publishing his observations in 1494. Columbus and his crew called the Capsicum fruits "peppers" (pimientos in Spanish) because they were pungent like black pepper (Piper nigrum). The introduction of chilies to Europe formed part of the wider interchange of plants, animals, and cultures between the New World and the Old World known as the Columbian exchange. Unlike Piper vines, which grow naturally only in the tropics, chilies could be grown in temperate climates. By the mid-1500s, they had become a common garden plant in Spain and were incorporated into numerous dishes. By 1526, they had appeared in Italy, in 1543 in Germany, and by 1569 in the Balkans, where they came to be processed into paprika.
Distribution to the rest of the world
The rapid introduction of chilies to Africa and Asia was likely through Portuguese and Spanish traders in the 16th century, though the details are unrecorded. The Portuguese introduced them first to Africa and Arabia, and then to their colonies and trading posts in Asia, including Goa, Sri Lanka, and Malacca. From there, chilies spread to neighboring regions in South Asia and western Southeast Asia via local trade and natural dispersal. Around the same time, the Spanish also introduced chilies to the Philippines, where they spread to Melanesia, Micronesia, and other Pacific Islands via their monopoly of the Manila galleons. Their spread to East Asia in the late 16th century is less clear, but was likely also through local trade or through Portuguese and Spanish trading ports in Canton, China, and Nagasaki, Japan. The earliest known mention of the chili pepper in Chinese writing dates to 1591, though the pepper is thought to have entered the country in the 1570s.
Regional cuisines
Chilies are present in many cuisines, including curries. In Peru, Papa a la huancaina is a dish of potatoes in a sauce of fresh cheese and aji amarillo chilies. In Thailand, kaeng tai pla fish curry is flavoured with a tai pla sauce made with garlic, shallots, galangal, kaffir lime, turmeric, fish paste, and bird's eye chilies. In Jamaica, jerk chicken is spiced with powerful habanero chilies and allspice. Goan vindaloo curry uses the extremely hot ghost pepper or bhut jolokia to create "perhaps hottest dish". In Bhutan, ema datshi, entirely made of chili mixed with local cheese, is the national dish. Many Mexican dishes use chilies of different types, including the jalapeño, poblano, habanero, serrano, chipotle, ancho, pasilla, guajillo, de árbol, cascabel and mulato. These offer a wide range of flavours including citrus, earthy, fruity, and grassy.
They are used in many dishes and the spicy mole sauce and Mexican salsa sauces. In Yoruba cuisine, chillies are well used in many dishes including Ewa Agoyin and Obe ata.