Monday, March 05, 2007

News For Curious Cooks: Ancient chillis

The history of chile peppers and their development as food in Mexico and Central America, which I've been thinking about in my earlier post today, has been in the news recently:

"The human diet must have gotten a little boring when our ancestors first learned to cultivate grains and root crops and began to lean heavily on these starchy staffs of life, after millions of years of eating this and that as hunter-gatherers. So when did humans start spicing up their monotonous new diet? Very early--in the Americas, even before the widespread use of cooking pots, according to a new report on the archaeology of the chilli 'pepper.' A group of fifteen scientists led by Linda Perry of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History published their results in this week's Science." So writes Harold MeGee in News For Curious Cooks: Ancient chillis

See also in the same blog: News For Curious Cooks: Chilli pungency: Tracking it back

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