This is a short series of posts inspired in the book Napoleon’s Buttons – How 17 Molecules Changed History by Penny Le Couteur & Jay Burreson, and to show that, after all, everything is about chemistry.
Before refrigerators existed, pepper mainly and other spices were crucial in storing and preserving food, and, probably, in disguising the bad taste and smell of rotten meat. The commerce of these goods was so lucrative that kings and merchants in the 15th century decided to challenge the Venetian monopoly of spice trade—the Age of Discovery was about to start.
Vasco da Gama’s voyages and the conquest of Calicut (Kozhikode) gave Portugal control over the pepper trade, and the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 sanctioned the Portuguese supremacy over the only countries where Piper nigrum, the pepper plant, grew.
Peppercorns contain an active ingredient called piperine which is responsible for the hot sensation we experience when we eat pepper. Curiously enough, this sensation is not a taste or flavor, but the response that the chemical stimulus caused by piperine evokes in our pain receptors.
In the meantime, Columbus was looking for a western route to India. When he landed in Haiti, he found another hot spice: chili pepper. While chili peppers became soon a main ingredient in African and Asian cuisines, Europe remained faithful to pepper and piperine. However, the Portuguese dominion of the spice route was doomed to end in less than two centuries, with the English and Dutch enlarging their areas of influence in the East Indies in the 17th century. [Silvana Munzi]
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