Chilli con carnage: the red hot pepper and communism

These days it is as hard to imagine Sichuanese food without chillies as it is to imagine Italian food without tomatoes. Both ingredients were among the New World crops that transformed culinary cultures across the globe after Christopher Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas in 1492. The chilli first appeared in China sometime in the late 16th century. Within 50 years it was rapidly gaining popularity and by the late 19th century it was ubiquitous in many parts of the country. Brian R. Dott has scoured Chinese and other sources to find out how and why this foreign spice conquered Chinese palates. He examines the chilli’s progress in China from multiple perspectives: culinary, medical, literary, aesthetic, economic and cultural.

Particularly fascinating is what he reveals of the informal and piecemeal way in which the chilli entered the country. Some New World crops, such as maize and sweet potatoes, were calorific foods that could not only feed a population in times of famine but enabled the cultivation of marginal lands unsuitable for rice and wheat, so they attracted the attention of governing elites; others, such as tobacco, became valuable cash crops.