History of hot stuff

TABLE TALK

FEW ingredients have had as profound or long-lasting an effect on the world’s culinary tastes as have chillies. That fire-breathing tingle, and the accompanying perfume, are mainstays of cookery in almost every nation.

Yet just 500 years ago, chillies were known to only a small fraction of the globe’s population, clustered in Central America. Tomatoes, potatoes, turkey, vanilla and cocoa also vie for recognition as key gastronomic discoveries of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World, but while they have been important, chillies have been hot stuff indeed.

As an effective measure of how populations responded to this new ingredient, consider the speed it spread at. Between 1494 and 1502, chillies spread from Mexico to Spain, then to Holland and Britain, then India and finally China. Within several generations, cookery in many of these nations began to incorporate chillies and a great adaptation commenced.

But surely adaptations like this mean that we need to reconsider what is intended by applying the term ‘traditional’ to food. Sichuan in China is home to some of the world’s most deliberately incendiary food, perhaps more intense because the use of Sichuan peppers have a numbing effect. Yet that ‘tradition’ is only about 350 years old at most.

In short, food is always evolving. And while there may not be entire new classes of ingredients left to discover, we should leave ourselves open to the adventure of new ideas, because there’s no telling when they’ll come along or where they might take us.

ROASTED MAHI-MAHI IN CHILLI-CITRUS SAMBAL

SERVES: 4

Ingredients

4 x 160g mahi-mahi fillets Sea salt flakes and freshly ground black pepper 12 dried red chillies

4 cloves garlic

½ cup desiccated coconut Finely grated zest and juice of 4 limes

Juice of 1 grapefruit

1 tsp ground cumin Roots of 1 bunch coriander 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil Bread and salad, to serve

1.