Sri Lanka’s generous habit of annexing new ingredients is one of the more positive ways in which it has reacted to the very mixed impact made on it by the island’s spice-mad colonial occupiers; and its traders. To the nine core spices indigenous to the island since the earliest of times, - cinnamon, pepper, long pepper, brindleberries, moringa, curry leaves, gutu kula, the blue butterfly pea flower, and turmeric – up to thirteen others have been introduced through the centuries and have become so commonplace as to be now classified as fully fledged residents.  The list includes chilli, cloves, cardamom, ginger, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, pandam leaves, fennel, tamarind, nutmeg, mace; and vanilla.

And four of these, the subject of this podcast - chilli, nutmeg, mace; and vanilla - arrived on the island courtesy of its occupying colonists: the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British. 

The most famous of these, chilli, a spicy vegetable widely used throughout Asia, only reached Asia in the past five hundred years, originating from Peru and Bolivia before being brought to the attention of a marvelling Spanish court by Christopher Columbus after his first voyage to the new world. In the diaries he kept on his voyage Colombus noted the existence of this new plant in an entry dated 15 January 1493 saying it was “a better spice than our pepper”. Within decades chilli had become a commonplace plant in Spanish gardens and by the mid fifteen hundreds it was to be found as a cooking ingredient from Scandinavia to the Balkans. 

And almost as quickly the plant also found its way to Sri Lanka, and other parts of Asia, due in large part to the Portuguese and their commercial thirst to control the Indian Ocean trade - and with it, its lucrative spice revenues. The spice’s adoption into Sri Lankan cooking came with an etymological twist for the Singhala term for pepper (“miris”) was transferred to chilli. Pepper was renamed “gam-miris” – literally “village pepper.”  Its penetration across the island semes to have been slow if the journals of Robert Knox the famous British captive of the King of Kandy is anything to go by. Knox’s book, “The Historical Relation of Ceylon” published in 1681, recorded just about anything that moved and most things that didn’t. And it fails to mention chilli. More than anything else this probably indicated the limited reach of the Portuguese settlement, which never properly incorporated the highlands of the Kandyan kingdom.

Rich in such vitamins as A, C and E, chilli’s natural chemical compounds, especially capsaicinoid, have prompted a wave of on-going scientific research into harnessing it to promote weight loss, relieve pain from arthritis, reduce inflammation, control LDL (bad) cholesterol to lower the risk of strokes and heart attacks and regulate blood sugar.  Some studies have also indicated its potential use in killing cancer cells.

But it is of course for its taste and flavour that it is most widely celebrated. And in this regard, there are as many influences as there are outcomes. Different varieties of pepper, their ripeness, colour, drying process and growing conditions – all influence how exactly its tastes, and smells. Smokey? Fruity? Grassy? Tart? Warm? Hot? Blistering? The vegetable’s extraordinary range and adaptability has ensured it can cover all these bases and more, making it one of the kitchen’s most flexible ingredients. From chilli pickle to chilli con carne, many of the dishes to which chilli adds its flavour have become household items everywhere. Barely a dish in Sri Lanka fails to include it – from sambals and curries to the sweetly exquisitely spicy banana pepper curry - and of course Lunu Miris, one of the island’s top pickles, made from finely chopped onions, red chili flakes, salt, lime juice, and Maldive fish, and able to go with just about anything. Foodies like to debate which cuisines tends to be hotter – Sri Lankan or Indian. But the answer is far from straightforward as it all depends on which regions you have in mind: the Chettinad or Kandy; Galle or Rajasthan; Tamil Nadu or Jaffna?

Three other spices, vanilla, nutmeg and its derivative, mace, also all arrived on the island courtesy of European colonists. 

Although not hatched from a single silver egg like the mythical Molionidai twins Eurytos and Kteatos, nutmeg and mace are, all the same, the conjoined twins of the spice world, being two quite separate kinds of spcies that derive from the same plant – Myristica fragrans. The nutmeg part of it is the hard round seed found within the fruit; it has a powerful musky flavour, woody, a little sweet, and unmistakably aromatic. The mace is the reddish orange membrane that surrounds the seed, with a scent that hardened Olfactors would describe as floral, citrus, light and delicate.

The tree that bears them is slow growing, deciduous, relatively tight in spread but able to reach heights of twenty to thirty meters. As you would expect from so special a spice, the trees inhabit the fussy end of propagation, demanding rich well drained soil at around 500 meters, nicely distributed rainfall of about 2,500 mm per year, a decent amount of shade, especially in their first years, and temperatures that range from between 20 to 30 degrees. 

The trees have a staggeringly constrained commercial history, with all specimens across the world deriving from plants that once only grew on the Banda Islands, a collection of islets that make up the 17,508 islands that is Indonesia today. Identified by the Portuguese as a major revenue earner, the spice became one of the most tightly controlled monopolies of the Indian Ocean trade. The Arab traders who, till then had been carrying and selling it across the region were muscled out and, until 1621, the Portuguese managed to keep trade in this spice to themselves. Naturally, this also meant a tight grip on production, and the various Portuguese governors across the East Indies took special care to ensure that no live pants escaped from Banda.

When eventually the Dutch stormed the Banda Islands and wrested control of nutmeg from the Portuguese, little other than control really changed. The Dutch VOC Company maintained as tight a grip and monopoly of the spice’s production, transport, and marketing as their colonial predecessors. This state of affairs continued until 1810 when the British captured most of the Dutch East Indies territories, including the Banda Islands. Although the islands were later returned to the Dutch 4 years later, the British by then had taken particular care to uproot as many nutmeg trees as possible for distribution and regrowth across its own Empire – including Sri Lanka, which it gained formally in 1802 at the Treaty of Amiens. 

It is possible that the monopoly has been more quietly ended a few years earlier if reports of the Frenchy seizing a cargo of Dutch nutmeg trees and carrying them off to the Caribbean are to be believed. Either way, the nutmeg monopoly had been ended and by the early eighteenth century the first nutmeg plantations in South Asia were recorded in Kerela, just across the sea from Sri Lanka itself, the work of an enterprising Scottish planter. Exactly when they came to Sri Lanka and where they were first planted is a matter of mildly rumbustious academic debate.

The global market for both spcies is relatively small in value – oscillating at around 250 million dollars annually, half coming from Indonesia, with Sri Lanka making up about five percent of the total, mostly from small plantations around Kandy, Kegalle, and Matale. But not Galagedera sadly for the nutmeg trees that once grew here ha...