Peppers are such a key ingredient in South Asian cuisine.
But peppers came from the New World in the Columbian Exchange.
So what was South Asian cuisine like before peppers arrived?
There are multiple different kinds of South Asian cuisine and pepper is not used in all.
But generally, stuff like Long (or Indian) pepper was used.
As an aside the biggest thing that I find amazing is that Tomatos and maiz/corn were not intriduced fully until the British conquest, in 1849.
Yet, tomato is pretty much used in every dish and the streotypical street snack is roasted corn on the cob or corn kernals…
Have you ever had Hare Krishna food? It tends, IME, not to be as spicy as modern Indian food. Or rather, not as “hot” spicy, as it’s plentifully-spiced.
Lots of South Asian food is not heavily spiced. It’s just the stuff most well known in the West is.
I know - I was going by what someone* in the West* might possibly have experienced that wasn’t. When I said “modern Indian food” I should have qualified that with “…in the West” as well - the ridiculously hot post-pub vindaloos being one example.
Most Cambodian and Vietnamese food still isn’t hot.
Potatoes are also ubiquitous in South Asian cuisine today and they were not present until the Columbian exchange.
It’s not just the Columbian exchange that changed things with South Asian cuisine. I believe tea, peaches and oranges are from China, apples from central Asia and so forth. Lots of foods now common throughout the world were only present in one place until people started to move them around.
BTW, in my experience in the US, Indian food doesn’t have the reputation for extremely spicy foods the way it does in the UK.
Agree, along with what we know as black pepper (peppercorns), which are also native to India. More here on the spice trade.
As far as what South Asian cuisine in general was like, maybe we’d have to get an idea of what spices and ingredients that are common today in these foods are originally from the Americas. Chilies are a good example, but what others? Sriracha sauce is a great example of this mish-mash (a Vietnamese sauce made with jalapeno peppers), and I know some Indian dishes contain potato, but what other classic Indian or SE Asian foods are dependent on ingredients from the Americas?
It’s thought of as spicy, but tinadaloos and phalls are essentially unknown here, but you will often see vindaloo. Your average UK Indian restaurant has a somewhat different menu than the average Indian restaurant at least here in Chicago. And, yes, I understand tindaloo and phall are extreme even for the UK, but, as far as I know, they are completely non-existent here.
And my impression of Indian cuisine, at least in Mumbai, Gujarat, and Rajasthan, is that the average level of spiciness for all dishes is spicier than the typical American dish. And I mean that both in terms of heat level and amount of spices used. Now, it certainly isn’t all that way, and certainly not all foods are spicy hot. But most foods I’ve had were spiced with a more varied spice mixtures than the typical salt-and-pepper standard.
I once saw a play about Vasci Da Gama’s influence on Indian cuisine that made these points
- No tea
- No chicken eggs (a type of chickens were native to India but for some reason this wasn’t part of the cuisine until European influence)
- No chilis, including bell peppers (capsicum)
- No onions or garlic (?)
- No tomatoes
- No potatoes (my mom puts potatoes in everything, so I can’t imagine Indian food without it)
- No corn (maize)
What else?
Oh, cool, thanks for reminding me. I just ordered some online. I know I’ve heard of it before, but I’ve never had the opportunity to try it. I’m curious to find out what it tastes like. The descriptions seem to be that of black pepper mixed with undertones of fragrant spices like ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, etc.
There are other ways to add heat to a dish. Black pepper, ginger, etc. The closest to the type of heat from hot peppers is hot basil. When the Thai cook with basil, they don’t add a small handful they use bags of it.
Not south Asian, but east, Korea made its famous pickled vegetables, including kimchi, without chilis. They added other vegetables for strengthening flavor, like garlic, onions, radishes. Also some fruits as well. They still do make those dishes, but nothing is as good as the punch from chilis.
Nitpick: chili peppers came from the New World. True peppers (piper nigrum) are native to India.
There’s a lot of nonsense here, or at least it has nothing to do with the Columbian Exchange or Vasco de Gama. Tea wasn’t popularized in India until the 18th century, and even then it was only as a byproduct of the East India Company growing it for British consumption.
Onions and garlic are native to the region, or at least they’ve been cultivated from Egypt to China (including the subcontinent) for several thousand years. Onions and garlic are disfavored in some Indian cuisine because Ayurvedic principles say they should be avoided (because they are “fiery” and thus bad for the body). In fact, garlic was popular with the Romans, and occasionally they traded it to Indians for pepper (which was even more popular with the Romans).
Maize, tomatoes and potatoes (and eggplants/aubergines) are all New World foods, but were not popular in Europe yet when de Gama traveled to India. Not sure about the egg thing.
I perhaps put that badly. I didn’t mean that Vasci Da Gama literally caused the adoption of those foods. The point was the massive changes in Indian cuisine starting from the time of Vasco Da Gama’s voyage and the subsequent trade facilitated by a revival of European contacts and trade stretching to the Americas. The only point was the prior absence of those ingredients from Indian cuisine.
I wasn’t sure whether garlic and onions are among those, hence the question mark. I do know that many Indians look upon them suspiciously and “pure vegetarian” cookery means no garlic and onions.
Oh, I see. That much is true, though it’s also true of almost all cultures. Everyone’s food has undergone massive transformations since ~1000 CE (even if you don’t count modern innovations such as factory farming).
That’s very true. Pick a recipe from whichever cuisine and go through the list of ingredients to separate those foods native to the area and those native to elsewhere. I suspect many recipes wouldn’t work if you had to limit the ingredients to native foods.
According to the Cambridge World History of Food, chili peppers were first described in India by a European in 1542; he considered these chilis to be native to India, a sign of how rapidly it had spread and how readily it was accepted.