Paprika

• 1. Introduction

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  Paprika appears in a Hungarian dictionary of 1604 under a different name: Török-bors, which means Turkish pepper. According to George Lang's book Cuisine of Hungary, that is the earliest dictionary reference to the spice. Today the red powder is the spice most closely tied to Hungary, yet that early entry treated it as something brought in by the Turks.

  Paprika is made by drying and grinding red peppers of the species Capsicum annuum. Some versions taste sweet. Others carry real heat. This documentary follows the spice across oceans, empires and kitchens.

  How did a plant first gathered in the Americas come to be called Turkish in central Europe? Why did the sweet kind arrive so late? What gives the powder its colour? And why does one Spanish version taste of smoke?

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• 2. From Mexico to Europe

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  Peppers were being gathered and eaten in Mexico around 7000 BC. By 3500 BC, people there were already cultivating them. All capsicum varieties descend from wild ancestors that grew along the Amazon River. In ancient times, farmers across South, Central and North America cultivated them, especially in central Mexico. The species behind paprika, Capsicum annuum, is native to northern South America and southwestern North America.

  The food writer Alan Davidson thinks Christopher Columbus probably met these peppers on his first voyage in 1492. He may even have carried plants back to Europe. Either way, peppers reached Europe through Spain and Portugal in the 16th century. Traders then moved them outward from the Iberian Peninsula to Africa and Asia. Spaniards and Portuguese also took them to India and south-east Asia.

  Italy had peppers by 1526 and Germany by 1543, so the plant spread fast. Hungary knew them by 1569. Growers in the Middle East and the Balkans took them up as well. The final leg into central Europe ran through the Balkans. Just beyond lay the middle of Hungary, which the Ottoman Empire ruled for much of the 16th and 17th centuries.

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• 3. The Ottoman Table

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  Filo pastry, which later evolved into the strudel, came to Hungary with the Turks. So did pilafs, pitta bread and paprika. The long Turkish presence brought all of these foods into the region. Paprika was also taken up within the Ottoman Empire itself.

  Near the end of the 17th century, industrialized production of paprika began. By the 18th century it was highly developed. The spice that came out of those workshops was hot.

  Until the 1920s, central European paprika stayed hot. Then a breeder in Szeged found a plant that bore sweet fruit. The breeder grafted that sweet fruit onto other plants.

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• 4. A Name Takes Shape

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  The Hungarian word paprika is a diminutive of papar, the Serbo-Croatian word for pepper. That word in turn came from the Latin piper or from modern Greek piperi. Similar forms such as peperke, piperke and paparka name peppers in various languages.

  In 1775, J. Csapé wrote of "paprika garden pepper" in his Herbarium. Only then did the name come into currency in Hungary.

  In various languages and regional varieties of English, the word can mean the plant and fruit behind the spice. It also stretches to peppers of the Grossum group, such as bell peppers.

  The first recorded English use of the word dates to 1830, in The Times. It described a pepper soup, or paprika soup, as a favourite among the Magyars, Turks and Servians.

  In her 1970 book Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, Elizabeth David noted that Edwardian cookery books sometimes called paprika Krona pepper.

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• 5. Colour and Heat

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  Red, orange and yellow paprika owe their shades to a mix of carotenoids, the natural pigments in the peppers. Reds come from capsanthin and capsorubin. Yellow-orange shades come mainly from alpha-carotene and beta-carotene, which are provitamin A compounds. Zeaxanthin, lutein and beta-cryptoxanthin add to those tones.

  One study found high concentrations of zeaxanthin in orange paprika. The same study found much more lutein in orange paprika than in red or yellow. Other studies found that yellow paprika powder has a significantly higher antioxidant capacity than other varieties.

  Even hot paprika is milder than chili powder. The peppers behind it tend to have thinner flesh than those used for chili powder. Traditionally they come from the Longum group of Capsicum annuum.

  Sweet paprika is mostly pericarp, the fleshy wall of the fruit, with more than half of the seeds removed. Hot paprika keeps some seeds, along with stalks, ovules and calyces. The peppers also come in blocky, mini and conical shapes.

  Sun drying is the usual way to turn the peppers into spice. In optimal conditions it can take up to 10 days.

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• 6. Hungary's Grades

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  George Lang lists five commercial grades of Hungarian paprika. Különleges means exquisite or delicate. Édesnemes is delicate, sweet-noble. Félédes is semi-sweet, rózsa is rose, and erős is hot. Davidson says the five run in descending order of excellence.

  Two principal growing areas lie in the south of the country. One surrounds the city of Szeged. The other sits at Kalocsa, on the Danube.

  Gulyás, a meat soup, is one of Hungary's best-known national dishes. The other is a stew that the world calls goulash. Inside Hungary it goes by pörkölt, porkélt or paprikás. Both dishes contain paprika.

  Paprikash is also a sauce of paprika, onions and sour cream. Cooks pair it with chicken and veal dishes, and with savoury crêpes.

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• 7. Iberian Kitchens

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  Pimentón de la Vera covers around 1,500 hectares and yields about 4.5 million kilograms a year certified under a Denomination of Origin. It tastes and smells distinctly of smoke. The peppers are dried by smoking, typically over oak wood.

  Pimentón is the Spanish name for a powder made from the small round fruits of several Capsicum annuum varieties. The Oxford Companion to Food says it "may reasonably be regarded as a Spanish version of paprika". It colours food, and it also works as a spice in its own right. Cooks add it to seafood, sausages, rice and many other savoury dishes.

  Three versions exist. Pimentón dulce is mild, pimentón agridulce is mildly spicy, and pimentón picante is spicy. Pimentón de Murcia is unsmoked. It is made from bola or ñora peppers and dried in the sun or in kilns.

  Spanish chorizo pork sausages depend on pimentón. The less familiar chorizo from the French side of the Pyrenees is traditionally spiced with piment d'Espelette instead. A Spanish chorizo may be mild or spicy, depending on the paprika used.

  Valencian paella mixes paprika and saffron with rice, meat and vegetables. Basque cooking uses the spice too. David points to mussels with spiced rice, Basque style, and to pheasant with spiced rice. Spanish cooks also typically add paprika to sofrito, the aromatic mixture of diced vegetables behind many stews and casseroles.

  In Portugal the powder is called colorau. It gives many Portuguese pork and poultry dishes their orange shade and piquant taste, much like a hot Hungarian paprika. Cooks also use it in fish dishes, including eels, cuttlefish and the mixed fish stew caldeirada. It spices the local equivalent of chorizo, called chouriço, and it deepens the shade of some Portuguese cheeses.

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• 8. Paprika Abroad

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  Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child, gives recipes for chicken fricassee with paprika. It also gives one for chicken breasts with paprika, onions and cream, called suprêmes de volaille Archiduc.

  French dishes labelled hongroise, meaning Hungarian, mostly rely on sauce hongroise. That sauce is chopped onions cooked with paprika and white wine, and cream is generally added. The list runs from bean and bacon soup to eel, calves' feet, hard-boiled eggs, frogs' legs and lobster. It also includes sole, turbot and veal escalope. Hungarian potatoes are large rounds cooked in butter with onions and paprika, then finished with diced tomatoes and consommé. Rouille, a sauce of paprika and garlic, is traditionally served with bouillabaisse.

  German cooks put paprika into fish stews, braised duck, casseroled hare, braised veal and fried goose liver. They also use it in stuffed cabbage leaves, meat dumplings and Rindergulasch, which is beef goulash. The chef Rick Stein says, "The people of Vienna love goulash so much they've taken the Hungarian dish and made it their own. The secret is to use lots of onion". The Viennese recipe calls for both sweet and hot paprika.

  In Moroccan cuisine, paprika is known as tahmira. It appears in dishes such as bissara and chermoula. In Arabian food it is an ingredient of the spice mix baharat. Across the Middle East, cooks may sprinkle it onto hummus just before serving, and it often garnishes baba ghanoush.

  Italian cooking uses little paprika. In the north-eastern region of Friuli, a former part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a spread called Liptauer mixes salted anchovies with ricotta, butter, paprika and chopped onion. Further south, in Molise, paprika flavours the salami ventricina. Even so, Italian soffritto typically relies on garlic where Spanish cooks reach for paprika.

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