Q&A
How Did Chile Peppers Get to China?
A new book addresses the chile pepper’s journey
Chinese cuisine is almost unimaginable without chile peppers. From Beijing to Chongqing to Shanghai to Hong Kong, you find chiles fresh, dried, and pickled, chile pastes, chile oils. Sometimes they dominate, as in the fiery food of Sichuan province; sometimes they’re condiments designed merely to accent delicate steamed dumplings. But they’re everywhere, so ubiquitous that an 18th-century Dutch botanist named one of the five domesticated varieties of chiles Capsicum chinense because he believed it originated in China.
He was wrong. Chiles are a New World fruit, and until 1494 they had never left the Americas. But once they did, they were all over the place. How did this happen in China? How did they not only make it halfway around the world but become so entrenched a part of the cuisine and the culture that even today, Chinese and non-Chinese alike have a hard time believing they’re an import?
The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography aims to answer these questions. Written by Brian R. Dott, a historian at Whitman College, it’s the first thorough, English-language investigation of the chile’s journey from curious foreign spice to an essential component of Chinese life. In February, at the 2020 New Mexico Chile…
