When did arrive in Peppers in Ireland? - Become popular as opposed to very first

MementoMori

Was talking to my dad a while back and the topic of when peppers became widespread in Irish shops came up.

He reckons peppers weren't widespread in Ireland twenty years ago.

I was just a just lad at the time but I said surely peppers were pretty widely available in Ireland in 1989. He said he wasn't sure.

Can anyone shed any light as to when peppers became widely available in Ireland?

Also if anyone does know when the first pepper arrived in Ireland pass it on as it would be just mental to know that. Tbh I doubt anyone can give an answer to this conclusively

Gyalist

Which peppers? Sweet peppers or chili?

MementoMori

Sweet peppers .

Talliesin

I remember seeing them in shops in the late 70s, and its worth adding that I had a working-class small-town childhood, so it wasn't full of a lot of more exotic items.

The first ones, I'm afraid I couldn't say. Columbus brought some capsicums back on his voyage, and there are mentions of them in England in the mid 16th century. I've no idea if this includes the type called bell or sweet peppers or only their hotter relatives (chilis), since they are all called by that name (the reason they are called "pepper" is that Columbus convinced himself they were a form of the same plant as black pepper, and hence that he had arrived in the Indies, which makes looking at old documents less than conclusive sometimes, as does "capsicum" covering all of the bell/sweet/chili etc. types of pepper).

Still, this gives us mid-16th century as a possible first time in Ireland, if someone brought them here from England.

The distribution of New World foods throughout the Old World tends to be very convoluted. We did not all start eating jalapeno pizza with chips the moment peppers, tomatoes and potatoes where first brought to Europe. Indeed, much of the character of different national cuisines is a matter of which New World foods were adopted where and when. In Ireland we were early adoptors of the potato because an experiment to prove that Peruvians really could eat them (as explorers reported) and they weren't actually poisonous was conducted here (funnily enough, they were believed poisonous because they were clearly of the nightshade family, but so are the peppers you are wondering about). Tomatoes were adopted in Italy partly because they grow well there and partly they were early in working out what on earth one can do with them (Europeans quickly adopted potoatos, corn and other plants that they could cook in the same way as similar plants they knew about already but tomatoes were truly outlandish and bizarre foods to us when they first arrived). Some rare (at the time) foods popped up where some rich guy had some; fagioli alla toscana owes something to a Medici Pope getting a present of some newly discovered types of beans. Amusingly quite a lot of such New World foods came to the North of America via Europe, and even with turkey - a bird native to North America - most birds eaten in North America are descended from birds bred in England.

All of this, while interesting in itself, makes tracing when a particular food (or even identifying it - if we say "turkey" in the context of the US, as described above, do we mean those whose ancestry went through England, wild turkey, or both) a tricky business.

Gyalist

I am not Irish but I first came to Ireland in 1986 and sweet peppers were easily available in rhe supermarkets. Chilis were a different matter. They were generally only available in the then small number of Asian shops and in specialist greengrocers like the former Fitzers on Camden Street.

In summer 1988 I remember cooking a Caribbean dish for some friends which required a relish made from fresh mangoes. It took me hours driving around Dublin to find one as no one seemed to know what a mango was. I eventually found one in Roy Fox's greengrocers in Donnybrook and it cost a whopping £5. Now mangoes are everywhere.

MementoMori

Great answers - especially Talliesin

I was pretty confident they would have been available in the late 80s but I didn't have any proof - more of a hunch. Kinda surprised they were widely available in the 70s.

While thinking of this further, I did think to ask a distant relative who would have been in the grocery trade in the 70s and 80s but I won't see him for a while, so when I do see him I will question him and see if he can shed any light on the matter.

I do remember my dad telling me he was eight or nine before he saw his first banana and being amazed (I was much younger then) This was during the Emergency so it's kinda understandable that they were fairly rare in rural Ireland.

Talliesin

MementoMori wrote: »

I do remember my dad telling me he was eight or nine before he saw his first banana and being amazed (I was much younger then) This was during the Emergency so it's kinda understandable that they were fairly rare in rural Ireland.

Banana imports into England were banned in 1940, which effectively made them impossible to get into Ireland. That's before we consider the effects of rationing and of U-boat activity against commercial shipping of any nation trading with the British Isles.

Bananas are an interesting case both horticulturally (they are very susceptible to all sorts of diseases that can wipe out crops) and politically (which countries get bananas from which countries is still a matter of International realpolitik).

MediaTank

I remember peppers in supermarkets in Dublin in the early 70s, as with now, they were mostly imported from Holland. Tallesin is spot on with why they are called peppers. The surnames Pepper, Peppard, Pfeffer, etc. all stem from the spice trade around the time of Columbus and so the 16th century mention likely refers to the hot chili variety.