Slaves: the Reason Peanuts are Everywhere and Thai Food Is so Fiercely Hot
They loved peanuts and chili peppers and took them wherever they went.
It’s hard to believe but for Centuries, people fought and died for black pepper. Yes. Black pepper.
It was worth its actual weight in gold. The peppercorns of the vine “piper nigrum” were so highly desired that trade routes from the Middle East to India were established to get it. This was well entrenched by around 1000 BC so that the history of this spice is woven into the history and demography of the ancient and modern world.
In fact, black pepper was used as currency in ancient Rome and it is said that a single pound of peppercorns could purchase freedom for a serf in France. But getting it was no piece of cake. You had to cross land routes guarded by hostile Muslim extortionists both going there and coming back
One of the main reasons Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic was to find a shorter and safer route to get black pepper from the Orient than having to traverse the land routes or to sail all the way around Africa to the Middle East. The Portuguese were already sailing around Africa and they were Spain’s biggest trading competitors.
What came back with Columbus and the Spanish explorers, however, was not black pepper but, in addition to stolen gold and silver, the fruits of capsicum plants we call “chili peppers”. They were very hot so Columbus and the boys just called them “peppers”. Their great heat was highly desired in the flat-tasting, wheat-based cuisines of that time and they took off in popularity. Demand soon rivaled that for black pepper, especially in the far east. From there Portuguese slaves carried them back to their sea ports around Africa and from there, African people made them known across much of the world..
The Spanish also brought back peanuts and sweet potatoes —- once again gifts from Native American peoples via Spanish explorers. Meanwhile, the Portuguese discovered that these things were a cheap means of satisfying the tastes and appetites of the African slaves they owned. They and their slaves wound up distributing chili peppers along the coasts of China and across Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. There they became (and remain) insanely popular.
As if that weren’t confusing enough, the African people who greatly loved those sweet potatoes, peanuts and chili peppers brought them back across the Atlantic to the shores of North America. This was the first time American colonials had ever encountered chili peppers! Even though those items had long been in the diets of Native Americans, it was their first introduction to the settlers of then British America.
So, it is perfectly understandable that for 500 years people in the far east, Europe and North America assumed that Africa and Asia were where all chilies originated. You can’t really blame them.
Columbus made 4 voyages to the New World, undoubtedly never realizing that one major result of those ventures would be the enormous, worldwide demand for Chili peppers and peanuts. You didn’t learn this in history class because almost nobody was aware of it.
To me this is absolutely fascinating! Columbus and the Spaniards went across the Atlantic Ocean to steal as much gold and silver as they could cram into their ships, totally unaware that, in their ignorance, they would create a worldwide market for native American foods worth more than the gold reserves of the Americas and which would employ millions of people around the globe from then on to satisfy the demand. The gold, it turns out, was by comparison virtually irrelevant. The foods, however, became a remarkably valuable, continuing and renewable resource.
You Can Do This
Kung Pao Chicken (or Shrimp)
One pound raw shrimp (peeled) or one pound raw chicken breast cut into cubes, placed into a bowl with 2 or 3 cloves smashed garlic, some peanut oil and two tablespoons of soy sauce. Allow to marinate for an hour.
Put into a separate bowl: one sliced medium sized onion, 2 or 3 seeded, sliced jalapeno peppers, one sliced red bell pepper, five or six chopped green onions, a half-can of sliced water chestnuts, 3/4 cup shelled peanuts (or plain old cocktail peanuts), 2 chopped stalks celery.
Fry all of the above on high heat until the meats are cooked (about 4 minutes). PS — You can tailor the heat level by leaving a portion of one of the jalapeno peppers with the seeds intact.
Add a mixture of one teaspoon cornstarch,one tablespoon soy sauce and one tablespoon water to the frying ingredients (or less) to thicken. Then serve hot with white rice and some crispy rice noodles. Season with soy sauce. Add heat with crushed red pepper flakes.
So, the next time you add red pepper to your pizza or have kung pao chicken at a Chinese restaurant, you will be enjoying some of the remarkable ingredients that Columbus, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Africans and, most importantly, the native American Indians contributed to the rest of civilization —- without ever knowing it. How strange it all seems in retrospect.
The Genius who Reinvented the Peanut
It’s a remarkable circumstance that African people brought to America as slaves, inspired the existing plantation culture in the South to start growing peanuts before most Americans “discovered” them. It is also fitting that George Washington Carver, a man born into slavery, became one of America’s foremost agricultural inventors.
It was Carver who developed over 350 uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes and pecans which included printers inks and cosmetics to say nothing of peanut butter.
Dr. Carver invented crop rotation in the South using peanuts as the means of both saving soil nutrients and improving crop yields. Farmers in the South had been unwittingly depleting their soils by continuing to plant cotton in the same fields year after year. By alternating with crops of peanuts, the soil’s nitrogen could be restored and subsequent crops productive. Dr. Carver turned down fabulous offers of money for his inventions, famously saying “God gave them to me, how can I sell them to someone else?”
Here’s an interesting related footnote: When the Turks consolidated Islamic rule across the Middle East, it so greatly harassed European trade along the old land routes that the Portuguese took to the sea around Africa and Columbus discovered America. So take that, you greedy Turks!
Footnote #2: The chiles produced by the capsicum plants are normally too hot for the mouths of mammals but not for birds. Birds can eat these chile peppers and their seeds without difficulty, thereby enabling the capsicum plants to easily reproduce themselves by traveling inside the birds when they fly away. Mammals typically remained in a single environment so Nature selected this phenomenon rather ingeniously.
Footnote #3: Chile peppers are rated according to the level of heat in each variety. This system was developed by Wilbur Scoville in 1912.
Footnote#4: The main source of the heat in a capsicum fruit is not the exclusively the seeds. Rather it’s the placenta, or the white pithy material, which holds the seeds.