It arrived from the Americas via Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century, and every cuisine it touched rebuilt itself around it
Muang Thai in Camden holds a 4.0 from three hundred and forty-seven people, charges twenty to thirty pounds, and the chilli in the food is not from Asia.
The Columbian exchange
The chilli is American.
It was domesticated in Mesoamerica, thousands of years ago – and it did not exist anywhere in Europe, Africa or Asia until the Spanish and Portuguese brought it back after 1492.
And then it travelled with astonishing speed, on Portuguese trading ships, around the coast of Africa, to India, to South East Asia, to China.
Within roughly a century it had been absorbed into cuisines on the other side of the world so completely that people assumed it had always been there.
What was there before
Pepper. Ginger. Galangal. Long pepper.
Thai food, Indian food, Sichuan food – all of them had heat before the chilli, and all of them had a completely different kind of heat, based on peppercorns and rhizomes.
And when the chilli arrived, it was cheaper, easier to grow, and considerably hotter – and every one of those cuisines rebuilt itself around it within a few generations.
The Prat’s culinary desk regards this as the single fastest and most complete culinary transformation in recorded history, and notes that it happened without anybody planning it.
Everything else that moved
And the list is genuinely staggering once you start.
The tomato is American. Italian cooking had no tomatoes until the sixteenth century.
The potato is American. Ireland, Russia, Germany – all of it.
Maize, cocoa, vanilla, peanuts, cassava, the turkey.
And going the other way: wheat, rice, sugar cane, coffee, cattle, horses, and the diseases that killed a very large proportion of the population of the Americas.
Almost every national cuisine on earth is a post-1492 construction, and every one of them presents itself as ancient.
Which is the finding
Seven postcodes and seven hundred and thirty-eight articles.
Nothing is as old as it says it is.
The Green Man was named in 1939. The margherita is very probably not a queen. Kaldi’s goats appear in print eight hundred years too late. The four castles of Camden are a wonderful story nobody can source.
And Thai food is unimaginable without an American fruit that arrived on a Portuguese boat.
Verdict
Good food, honest number.
Go, and thank Portugal.
The Thai basil
Which is one of the few things on the menu that genuinely is from there, and which is worth ordering for.
Holy basil, Thai sweet basil, and lemon basil are three different plants doing three different jobs – and a great many British Thai restaurants use whichever they can get.
The anise note in Thai sweet basil is the one people recognise. Holy basil is peppery and considerably more assertive, and it is the one in a proper pad krapow, and it is genuinely hard to source in Britain.
If a menu offers you a pad krapow, ask which basil.
The answer tells you more about the kitchen than anything else you could ask.
Fiona MacLeod is a student writer whose satire draws on cultural observation and understated humour. Influenced by London’s academic and creative spaces, Fiona’s writing reflects curiosity and thoughtful comedic restraint.
Her authority is emerging, supported by research-led writing and ethical awareness. Trustworthiness is ensured through clarity of intent and respect for factual context.
Fiona represents a responsible new voice aligned with EEAT standards.
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