Flipped but not read

Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook
by Fuchsia Dunlop


I read a lot of this, but not enough to call it "read". But this is interesting--

The chili itself, now at the heart of Hunanese cooking, only reached China from the Americas in the late Ming, although the Hunanese were among the first in China to adopt it, in the late seventeenth century.

It turns out it was Portuguese traders who spread the chili pepper. Columbus and the early English traders were looking for black pepper (genus Piper, family Piperaceae). Chili peppers are classified in the genus Capsicum in the Nightshade (Solanaceae family).  They were adopted so quickly into Indian and Chinese cooking that early botanists assumed the plants originated in the east, and they're not alone. As she says,
Many Chinese find it hard to believe that chili peppers are not indigenous to China.