1492: Columbus Discovers Hot Sauce

A Taste of Paradise

by Robb Walsh

LIAT Airlines, Flight 347-- As the twin-engine Otter Turboprop begins to climb out of St. Lucia, my face is pressed to the window. I am completely transfixed by the aerial view. The sky is delft blue; ahead of us fat, clumsy, white clouds are tripping over the suggestive curves of the soft green mountains. Little green gumdrop-shaped outcroppings dot the coast. As the shoreline comes into view, I look down into violet, deep indigo, aquamarine, and pale green swatches of colored water.

illustration by A.J. Garces

I am heading for Dominica, the nature island, and in my lap is a book called Tastes of Paradise, by a German writer named Wolfgang Schivelbusch. This chronicle of man's search for sensual pleasures through food and beverages has got me thinking about the Caribbean in a completely new light. The book begins with a description of the absolute frenzy in Europe over spices during the Middle Ages. Before you can understand the spice trade, Schivelbusch says, you have to understand that in the medieval imagination, pepper, cinnamon, and ginger were linked with a vision of heaven.

The intense demand for spices had nothing to do with necessity and everything to do with a yearning for paradise. By the 15th century, pepper traded ounce for ounce with gold and Europe's entire system of social status and a large part of its economy were defined by spices. Every entrepreneur and adventurer alive was obsessed with finding a new route to the paradise where spices grew.

When Columbus sailed to the West Indies and encountered hot peppers, he thought he had reached the Spice Islands. It's intriguing to look at the impossibly beautiful island below me and think of how it must have looked to Columbus, a man who had never seen a travel poster. Who could blame him if he went back to Spain and reported he had found paradise?

In fact, the Caribbean has always lured paradise-seekers. Nineteen centuries before Columbus, the Arawak Indians began to make their way in dugout canoes from South America to Trinidad. The white beaches and clear water of the tropical islands they found were quite a change from the muddy river and the unbroken jungle of the continent. Delighted by the beauty and bounty they discovered, the Arawaks began to migrate to the islands in large numbers. They called their new home Irie, the land of the hummingbird.

The Arawaks brought with them from South America the Capsicum chinense pepper, cassava, pineapple, and maize. For some 10 centuries, the Caribbean islands as far north as Jamaica belonged exclusively to these peaceful fishermen and farmers. It wasn't until the eighth or ninth century, A.D. that another South American tribe called the Caribs began to invade the Arawak villages in their huge war canoes. The Caribs had their own designs on paradise and were in the process of eradicating the Arawaks and taking over the best beaches when Columbus arrived. Several accounts by Spanish explorers mention that the Carib chiefs sent gifts of food to Columbus' ships. Unfortunately, no one recorded the fateful moment when the first European bit into a Caribbean pepper or tasted the Carib's hot sauce. It is extremely likely that the Spanish tasted the hot sauce, since the Caribs put it on everything they ate. We know the Spanish tasted the peppers somehow since Columbus brought specimens back to Spain and bragged about how hot they were.

What did that primordial hot sauce taste like? Well, it wasn't until 1647 that a recipe for Carib hot sauce was first recorded, but odds are it hadn't changed much since Columbus. A French priest named Father Breton wrote a report which contains this description:

"They make a certain sauce which they consume with everything that they eat. They throw the bones of the fish they have eaten into a pot with a handful of peppers, manioc juice and cassava flour, mixing everything together and soaking their bread and meat therein. They call this a tomaly."

By 1694, the lime, which was introduced by the Europeans, had begun to replace the cassava juice in Amerindian hot sauces. Another French priest visiting Dominica, Jean Baptiste Labat, described the Carib's pepper sauce this way: "A gravy of manioc with lime juice in which they crush such a great quantity of pepper that it is impossible for anyone other than themselves to make use of it."

In later descriptions, the Amerinidan hot sauce is called taumali or taumalin and is said to consist of only lime juice, peppers, and crabs. The English word tomalley, which is used in cookbooks to describe the greenish liver of lobsters, comes from the Carib word for hot sauce, taumali.

As my plane touches down in Dominica, I imagine Columbus eating his first mouthful of that pepper and crab goop. Did he secretly mutter, "I sailed across an ocean to discover this?" as he hopped around in pain and gulped several glasses of Spanish wine to cool his tonsils? Whatever he thought about his first taste of Caribbean peppers, he went home in triumph convinced he had found paradise.

As my plane touches down on Dominica, I am pondering Schivelbusch's theory that Western civilization's historical craving for spicy foods is part of a mass escapist fantasy. I wonder if the modern-day interest in tropical peppers and hot sauces is related to the same sort of yearning for paradise that created the spice trade and motivated Columbus? When we sprinkle our breakfast eggs with some exotic hot sauce, are we just looking for a spicy jolt, or are we trying to conjure up heavenly white beaches, swaying palms, and turquoise waters, just like the Europeans of the Middle Ages? Are we still looking for paradise?

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Taumalin

Here, as close as I can come, is a recipe for the granddaddy of Caribbean hot sauces. If you like to sop the green goop from the inside of a cooked lobster or crab (I usually eat it on rye bread), you won't find this recipe all that unusual.

• Meat, and greenish innards from six cooked crabs
• Juice of four small Mexican limes
• 1 Caribbean pepper, stemmed, seeded, and minced

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl, and allow the flavors to combine for a few minutes. Serve as a sauce.

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Carib Crab Salsa

Okay, so the green goop from the inside of crab shells isn't something you'd eat, never mind serve. And live crabs are hard to come by. But you can get the same idea of that early Carib hot sauce by using lump crab meat. For the last three hundred years, crab, peppers, and lime have formed the holy trinity of Caribbean ingredients. Before you add the other ingredients, try them all by themselves for a sense of the unadulterated flavor of the Caribbean.

• 6 cooked crabs (or 1-1/2 cups lump crab meat)
• Juice from 6 small Mexican limes
• 1 Caribbean pepper, chopped
• 1/2 red onion, chopped
• 4 scallions, chopped
• 1 tablespoon chopped cilantro
• 1/2 bell pepper, chopped
• Salt to taste

Over a mixing bowl, remove all the meat from the crab shells, saving as much juice as possible. Combine the crab with the remaining ingredients, and chill the mixture. Serve with grilled fish or over salad greens.