By Joel Denker
The jar of reddish orange relish, an offering from one of my students, fascinated me. The condiment, a mixture of eggplant and mild red peppers, was a popular appetizer in much of the former Yugoslavia, where my student had grown up. Its name, ajver, was a Turkish word that had been absorbed into the language of the lands the Ottomans had conquered. The root of our word, caviar, it meant a simple vegetable spread that could replace the more elegant fish roe.
Vipro, a company from Macedonia, a former Turkish colony, manufactured the product I held in my hand. Now independent, its thriving canning industry was making a preserve year round that housewives used to put up in late summer and early fall after the pepper harvest.
I set the chunky puree on the dining table along with a Mediterranean meal of lamb patties, spiced with cumin, cinnamon, and coriander, and Greek salad. After eating some lamb, I would savor a spoonful of ajver. The tangy blend complimented the earthy kebabs.
“Roasted and peeled paprika.” These were among the ingredients listed on the jar. I was confused. I thought paprika was a spice. The company obviously was referring to the red peppers. I was curious about how the sweet pepper, a vegetable born in the Americas from the same family as the chili pepper, made its way to the Balkans.
My quest for the answer began with the puzzling name, pepper. It’s the English translation of pimiento, Spanish for the colorful spicy plant that explorers carried back from the New World to the Iberian peninsula. The Indians knew it as chili or as aji. The Spaniards called it pimiento or red pepper because they associated its bite with black pepper.
Black pepper (pimienta) was the prize that Christopher Columbus was seeking when he landed in Hispaniola. He became intrigued with a more incendiary seasoning. “There is also much chili, which is their pepper, of a kind more valuable than (black) pepper, and none of the people eat without it, for they find it very helpful,” he remarked in his journal.
The explorer presented it to the Spanish Court in 1492. Sailors returned with more seeds. Spanish padres in the Americas gathered chilies and sent them back home. By the 1500s. the plants were growing in the country’s gardens.
The chili pepper was coveted because it answered the need of many countries for a less expensive, easily transportable substitute for the dearer black pepper. The Portugese spread the seeds (probably taken from Spain and Brazil) throughout their maritime empire during the 15th and 16th centuries. They transplanted them in India, Africa, China (Macao), and Indonesia.
As another imperial giant, the Turks, expanded, they collided with the Portuguese. The story now becomes a composite of speculation, best guesses, and empirical evidence (I have relied on accounts by George Lang, Zoltan Halasz, Amal Naj, and Maria Kaneva-Johnson.) The Turks laid siege to two Portuguese outposts, Hormuz, a spice entrepot on the Persian Gulf, and Diu, a gateway on the southwest coast of India to the chili and black pepper fields. It was during these assaults, the first in 1513 and the second in 1538, that the Turks probably grabbed the pepper.
The Ottomans pushed ahead, conquering great tracts of the Middle East and marching into Eastern Europe and the Balkans. They enlisted locals to feed their troops and to provision the growing numbers of settlers occupying the new lands. The hot pepper was one of the many crops the Turks introduced and their hired agriculturists cultivated.
The Bulgarians were the most proficient of the Christian farmers that the Muslim rulers employed, food historian Maria Kaneva-Johnson points out. They had a knack for growing produce. Moreover, Bulgaria, which the Turks took over in 1392 and held for 500 years, was strategically located. It was a “campground,” as a Bulgarian friend called it, a stepping stone into the Balkans. The “Gardeners of Europe” disseminated the Turkish imports through the Balkans and further afield to Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.
Hungary, vanquished by the Turks in 1526, was enthusiastic about the Bulgarian gift and transformed their cooking with the pungent spice. Its people coined the word paprika, which denoted both the spice and the vegetable, from the Bulgarian piperka or pepper.
A new crop caught the eye of a writer who was exploring the Hungarian countryside in the late 18th century. “The paprika is grown in gardens. Its fruit is long, vivid red,” Jozsef Csapo noted. “The peasants grind it into a powder when it dried, and mix it in their food. You can obtain paprika for a good word here and there if you need it.”
Paprika fairs displayed the wares that villagers were producing. Garlands of red pepper pods for sale and large open bags of the red powder were drawing cards for market goers.
The red pepper was first peddled by traveling apothecaries as a medicine. It was gradually woven into Hungarian foodways. The brilliant color, fragrance, and fire of the pepper appealed to the country’s commoners. Shepherds tried perking up bacon with the novel spice and seasoning stews with it. Fishermen joyed in soups and other seafood dishes that paprika invigorated.
The upper classes gradually acquired a taste for paprika. Count Hoffmannsegg, who traveled through Hungary between 1793 and 1794, described his encounter with the flavoring: “They advised me to sprinkle it {a meat dish} with ground paprika. I tasted this Turkish pepper, which is here called paprika, for the first time when the stuffing of the cabbage was seasoned with it..It is pungent, but only for a short time and makes the stomach feel very warm.”
Paprika took the place of ginger, saffron, and other seasonings in sophisticated Hungarian cooking. It also added verve to gulyas (our goulash), a basic stew which had depended on lard and onions for flavor. Paprika was so inseparable from Hungarian cooking that many assumed it was native to the country. “A lot of Hungarians get upset if you tell them that the pepper was not always there,” food historian Susan Tax Freeman observed.
Once a cottage enterprise, the paprika industry modernized and mechanized. Scientists searched for a better way to develop a milder pepper than by the time consuming process of removing the veins and seeds of a hot one. In the early 1900s. they stumbled on a variety growing in a field where peasant women had planted pungent peppers on the border of sweet peppers. The two types cross-fertilized and gave birth to one with an exquisite fragrance and handsome color but without the sharp bite. Intensive breeding created the classic Hungarian red conical pepper from which a “noble sweet” spice was ground.
By the end of the nineteenth century Balkan farmers were probably growing the sweet pepper. Cooks developed a dazzling repertoire of dishes relying on their favorite red pepper, which makes our own use of the vegetable look pedestrian. I perused the menu of Cafe Sofia, the Bulgarian restaurant on Columbia Road in Adams-Morgan, and noticed a plethora of pepper plates. Two specialties, kiopoulu and liutenitza, enticed me with their exotic names. I was eager to plunge ahead on my pepper voyage.
Originally published in The InTowner: http://intowner.com/food-in-the-hood/
