Cayenne pepper

Did You Know?

• The word cayenne likely derives from kyynha, meaning "capsicum" in the Old Tupi language once spoken in Brazil.
• English botanist Nicholas Culpeper used the phrase "cayenne pepper" in 1652, before the city of Cayenne was renamed in 1777.
• In North America, the primary cultivar in crushed red pepper is cayenne.

Taxonomy

The cayenne pepper belongs to Capsicum annuum, a species that also includes bell peppers, jalapeños, and pimientos, within the nightshade family Solanaceae. Although sometimes considered a variety of Capsicum frutescens, cayenne peppers hang from the bush, whereas true frutescens peppers, such as tabasco, grow upright. In the 19th century, modern cayenne peppers were classified as C. longum, later synonymised with C. frutescens, while cayenne powder was often made from bird's eye peppers, then classified as C. minimum. Nicholas Culpeper's 1653 Complete Herbal listed cayenne pepper as a synonym for "pepper (guinea)", a term that by the late 19th century referred to bird's eye chili or piri-piri.

Varieties

Cayenne peppers are long, skinny, and usually red, with a curved tip and rippled skin, hanging down from the bush. They come in many named types, like Cow-horn, Ring of Fire, and Cayenne Thomas Jefferson. While most are red today, yellow and purple varieties exist, and yellow ones were common in the 1800s. Most cayennes rate between 30,000 and 50,000 Scoville units, though some mild types are 20,000 or less.

History

Cayenne peppers have been cultivated by indigenous peoples of the Americas for 7,000 years. They originated in what is now French Guiana and were introduced to the rest of the world by Christopher Columbus around 1493. At that time, a spice shortage in Europe, caused by myths about spice origins and heavy taxes by the Ottoman Empire, made peppers a luxury item. Cayenne peppers, being easy to grow, helped end the shortage by serving as a substitute for expensive spices like black pepper, earning them the name "the poor man's pepper".