Penny le Couteur & Jay Burreson Read Online Free Page A

Portuguese explorers ventured as far south as Cape Verde, on the northwestern coast of Africa. By 1483 the Portuguese navigator Diago Cão had explored farther south to the mouth of the Congo River. Only four years later, another Portuguese seaman, Bartholomeu Dias, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, establishing a feasible route for his fellow countryman, Vasco da Gama, to reach India in 1498.
    The Indian rulers in Calicut, a principality on India’s southwest coast, wanted gold in return for their peppercorns, which was not what the Portuguese had in mind if they were to take over world dominance in pepper. So five years later, da Gama, returning with guns and soldiers, defeated Calicut and brought the pepper trade under Portuguese control. This was the start of a Portuguese empire that eventually extended eastward from Africa through India and Indonesia and westward to Brazil.
    Spain had also set its sights on the spice trade, pepper in particular. In 1492 Christopher Columbus, a Genoese navigator convinced that an alternative, and possibly shorter, route to the eastern edge of India could be found by sailing westward, persuaded King Ferdinand V and Queen Isabella of Spain to finance a voyage of discovery. Columbus was right in some but not in all of his convictions. You can get to India by going westward from Europe, but it is not a shorter route. The then unknown continents of North and South America as well as the vast Pacific Ocean are considerable obstacles.
    What is it in pepper that built up the great city of Venice, that ushered in the Age of Discovery, and that sent Columbus off to find the New World? The active ingredient of both black and white pepper is piperine, a compound with the chemical formula C 17 H 19 O 3 N and this structure:

    Piperine
    The hot sensation we experience when ingesting piperine is not really a taste but a response by our pain nerves to a chemical stimulus. How this works is not fully known, but it is thought to be due to the shape of the piperine molecule, which is able to fit onto a protein on the pain nerve endings in our mouths and other parts of the body. This causes the protein to change shape and sends a signal along the nerve to the brain, saying something like “Ow, that’s hot.”
    The story of the hot molecule piperine and of Columbus does not end with his failure to find a western trade route to India. When he hit land in October 1492, Columbus assumed—or maybe hoped—that he had reached part of India. Despite the lack of grand cities and wealthy kingdoms that he had expected to find in the Indies, he called the land he discovered the West Indies and the people living there Indians. On his second voyage to the West Indies, Columbus found, in Haiti, another hot spice. Though it was totally different from the pepper he knew, he nevertheless took the chili pepper back to Spain.
    The new spice traveled eastward with the Portuguese around Africa to India and beyond. Within fifty years the chili pepper had spread around the world and was quickly incorporated into local cuisines, especially those of Africa and of eastern and southern Asia. For the many millions of us who love its fiery heat, the chili pepper is, without a doubt, one of the most important and lasting benefits of Columbus’s voyages.

HOT CHEMISTRY
    Unlike the single species of peppercorn, chili peppers grow on a number of species of the Capsicum genus. Native to tropical America and probably originating in Mexico, they have been used by humans for at least nine thousand years. Within any one species of chili pepper, there is tremendous variation. Capsicum annuum, for example, is an annual that includes bell peppers, sweet peppers, pimentos, banana peppers, paprika, cayenne peppers, and many others. Tabasco peppers grow on a woody perennial, Capsicum frutescens.
    Chili peppers come in many colors, sizes, and shapes, but in all of them the chemical compound responsible for their pungent flavor