When the Spanish and Portuguese explorers first arrived
in the New World, an explosion of new edibles, among them
potatoes, chocolate, chilies, tomatoes, corn and peanuts,
greeted their senses. The Portuguese carried these foods
with them as they circumnavigated the world, going in
two directions. Of all the foods, the peanut seemed to
have the broadest acceptance wherever they landed. While
vanilla, chocolate and tomatoes may have excited Europeans,
the peanut was embraced and cultivated more widely in
Asia and Africa. In those cultures, as well as at its
seat of origin in Latin America, the peanut was a central
culinary asset; it was a key provider of fat and protein.
It was ground and made into a sauce, prized for its thickening
ability, and commonly eaten as a snack, either boiled,
fried or roasted.
Peanut-shaped pottery unearthed in Inca ruins and dating
back 3,500 years gives us our earliest evidence of the
peanut. The peanut was called ynchic in the Inca tongue.
Historians have variously placed the origin of the peanut
in Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico or Peru. Maricel
Presilla, historian, chef and restaurateur, believes
the peanut originated in the lowlands of Bolivia or Brazil,
in the Amazonian basin. Before the Iberians arrived, the
peanut traveled via the Amazonian tribes to Columbia,
across the Andes to Peru, and north into Central America
and into the Caribbean.
In the chronicles of the European
travelers, the peanut is described as coming from a plant
with fruits that look like pine nuts, says Presilla. The
natives were using it as a roasted food as well as a thickener.
Although they wrote about it, the Europeans avoided eating
peanuts, looking on it as a food of slaves, or lower classes.
For that reason, as well as the difficulty of growing
it outside of tropical conditions, the peanut was not
cultivated in the Mediterranean until the 18th century.
Europe was the last continent to make use of the peanut.
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