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Comment by fuzztester | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK India didn't have corn either. Like chilies and potatoes and a few other plants, it came from the Americas.

Article on Indian food before modern European contact:

https://contingentmagazine.org/2020/06/25/curry-before-colum...

The article focuses quite a bit on asfoetida, but makes no mention of peppercorns which are native to India. When Europeans sailed to India for spices, they weren't going an asfoetida or turmeric run. It was pepper they sought (and I guess cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves too - though some of those might be from Indonesia idk).

I always assumed pre-Columbian Indian food had fieriness and heat from pepper (bite into a whole peppercorn - it's plenty fiery), so there was a pre-existing cultural affinity for that flavor. This to me explained the rapid assimilation of chilli peppers into virtually every regional Indian cuisine.

also long pepper, which is supposed to be hotter than pepper. called piper longum.

some of the spices you mention were originally from the Malacca area, but were later grown in South India as well.

Cinnamon sugar was a bigger deal than anyone gives a credit for now.

Mace and cloves only grew in the southern moluccas and when the Dutch took over from the Portuguese they genocide the local Melanesian population with the help of some peoples of the western islands.

As an Indian I definitely find corn out of place in our cuisine. But the others are pretty essential.

Really? Makki ki roti is a pretty key part of Punjabi cuisine.

Huh, didn’t know. Maybe because I’m from South India and the cuisine is pretty different there?

And the list goes on of the food products that only existed in the Americas - chocolate, coffee, hot peppers.

But of course it goes both ways. I just had traditional breakfast in an isolated Zapotec village in Mexico. But of course the cheese wasn’t part of it until the Spaniards arrived.

You’re off on coffee, a few months ago I too assumed it came from the Americas because it grows so well here, but was surprised to learn it’s actually an old world thing.

https://www.ncausa.org/About-Coffee/History-of-Coffee

The name coming from Arabic is a big hint. And then the species called C. arabica.

Coffee came from Ethiopian highlands, according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee

And interestingly, many of them are from the nightshade family, the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanaceae .

Whats interesting is why nightshades diversified and selectively bred into so many staple plants in the new world but the nightshades in the old world did not.

Black nightshade berries native to Europe are easily mistaken for the latter stages of potato plant development, for example.

I can’t think of any Indian dishes that use corn.

I can think of two, or at least, one dish and one snack:

dish: makki ki roti (roti made from corn flour) with sarson kaa saag (mustard greens, cooked). this is a very common, even iconic, Punjabi dish. I've only tried it once myself. didn't like the corn roti much. the mustard greens were fine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makki_ki_roti

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarson_ka_saag

snack: whole corn roasted on a fire, i.e. corn on the cob. bhutta in hindi. ubiquitous in india.

Yep bhutta is everywhere but I was referring to corn in dishes. I had no idea makke di roti was corn.

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