Botany · Ch 10 — Economically Useful Plants & Entrepreneurial Botany
Spices and Condiments
Spices and Condiments
Spices are aromatic plant products, sweet or bitter in taste, added in small quantities during cooking to improve palatability — black pepper is the text's own example — while condiments are sharp-tasting flavouring substances usually added after cooking, such as curry leaves. Both have a long global history: records of onion and garlic use stretch back roughly 2,500 years, the earliest dyeing/spice evidence appears in ancient Egyptian tomb art, and most spices originate from the Mediterranean, India and South East Asia. Notably, the historic search for pepper drove the European exploratory sea voyages of the Spanish and Portuguese to India. Cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum, family Zingiberaceae), the 'Queen of Spices', is native to Southern India and Sri Lanka and is a major cash crop of the Western Ghats and North-Eastern India. Turmeric (Curcuma longa, family Zingiberaceae), native to Southern Asia, has India as the world's largest producer, consumer and exporter, with Erode in Tamil Nadu the world's largest wholesale turmeric market; besides its huge role in curry powders and as a food/pharmacy/confectionery colourant, and in dyeing leather, fibre, paper and toys, its active compound curcumin is a strong antioxidant with anti-inflammatory, anti-diabetic, antibacterial, antifungal and antiviral properties, and is even credited with reducing platelet clotting that leads to heart attacks. Chillies or Red Pepper (Capsicum annuum and C. frutescens, family Solanaceae), native to South America, are led in production and export by India; C. annuum fruits, including sweet bell peppers and the long, pungent 'Cayenne pepper' cultivars, are generally less pungent than C. frutescens, and their active compound capsaicin — measured on the Scoville Heat Unit scale, from around 30,000-50,000 SHU for cayenne up to the extreme 2,200,000 SHU of the Carolina Reaper — has pain-relieving properties used in medicinal balms, alongside chillies being a good source of vitamins A, C and E. Tamarind (Tamarindus indica, family Fabaceae-Caesalpinioideae), a condiment native to tropical Africa and introduced into India, Myanmar and other South and Central Asian/African countries thousands of years ago, gets its name f …
What this figure shows. A four-panel photographic plate of the major spices named in the text. The Cardamom panel shows the small, ridged, pale-green triangular-cross-section pods of Elettaria cardamomum, some split open to reveal the dark aromatic seeds inside — the plant is called the 'Queen of Spices' in the text. The Turmeric panel shows the deep orange-yellow interior of a cut Curcuma longa rhizome alongside the knobbly beige-skinned whole rhizomes, and often the bright orange-yellow powder made from them. The Chillies panel shows a cluster of red and green Capsicum fruits of varying length and shape. The Black Pepper panel shows clusters of small round peppercorns still on the vine, both in their green unripe state and …
What this figure shows. A photograph of the tamarind tree, Tamarindus indica, and/or its distinctive fruit — a thick, curved, brown pod with a brittle shell that, when broken open, reveals a sticky, fibrous, dark reddish-brown pulp surrounding a row of hard, shiny seeds. The image illustrates the condiment plant the text describes as native to tropical Africa and whose name (from Arabic, 'tamar-Indus', dates of India) reflects its lon …