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Capsicum annuum L. Grossum group
Turkish: biber; French: paprica, poivron; Italian: peperone; Spanish: pimiento; Greek: piperies; Arabic: filfil
Plant origin
The pepper, both taxa with the pungent capsaicin and those without, appears to be native to tropical South America. On the other hand, the nature of the genus Capsicum is not fully understood, and therefore it is difficult to determine the place of origin. The earliest evidence of cultivated pepper is from the earliest archeological levels at Tamaulipas and Tehuacan in Mexico, which date from before 5000 B.C.
Plant history
The first record of the pepper in the Mediterranean is after Colombus's voyages to the New World.
Colombus saw peppers growing in the Caribbean. In his journal entry for January 15, 1493, he wrote that the natives called the plant aji (ah-hee). He named them pimiento, after the spice, black peppercorns (Piper negrum), he had been seeking. This is how the capsicums came to be known as peppers. Also in 1493 Pietor Martire d'Anghiera, the Italian cleric and historian at the court of Barcelona, stated in a letter that Colombus did indeed find a pepper more pungent than those from the Caucasus (P. Nigrum). The hot varieties were dried and powdered and used as a substitute by Spanish cooks for the spice pepper P. nigrum
which was expensive and imported from the East.Once it was introduced to the Mediterranean, the pepper was accepted almost immediately, unlike tomatoes and potatoes, which took much longer to gain favor. The initial agents of this diffusion from the New World to the Old World were principally Portuegese mariners and traders; the Spanish played a secondary role. Later the Spanish were principally responsible for the diffusion of peppers, throughout the Mediterranean during the late 16th century. Seafaring Greek captains brought pepper to Greece and the Balkans by the mid-fifteenth century, and by 1569 the Hungarians used the word paprika and were growing pepper as a spice after having been introduced to peppers by the Turks.
Today, paprika refers to a ground product of bright red mild peppers of one or more varieties.
