Peppers

Perhaps even more astounding is that it was also a world without the capsicum peppers-the bells and jalapeños and cayennes and a hundred others that spice the cooking of the Mediterranean, of Africa, of India, of China, and of Southeast Asia. Columbus took hot peppers back to Spain on his maiden voyage, and Mediterranean cooking was changed forever. By 1643, the French had founded Cayenne in Guyana, naming their outpost after the Tupi Indian word for hot pepper. More important for the lowcountry, slaves were traded along the same routes as spices. The West Africans who were brought to the lowcountry as slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were long used to a cuisine highly spiced with the capsicums. It was the hand of the black cook that spiced the foods of the English, French, and German settlers here. Our cooking is creole, like that of Louisiana, but it has more African influences.