Wordwise: Of chile the pepper and Chile the country

By Gerald Lauzon, Cornwall Standard-Freeholder

From early contact in Central America between Spanish explorers and Aztec folk, local spicy peppers — primarily the jalapeño type — were noted as “chiles” (pronounced “chill-ays”).

Other similar fruits were also tagged as “chiles” — a term which had the indigenous sense “hot-to-the-taste.” Later, hot peppers were more specifically named for the terrains where they mostly grew as in these examples: jalapeños from Xalapa, poblanos from Puebla, serranos from a Sierra Mountain region. Spanish and Portuguese explorers then took chile plants and seeds to see if they would grow in their home countries and in trade-affiliated Asian countries near and around the South China Sea (India, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, and China). Most chile pepper varieties thrived in the new tropical environments.

Before and during the 1900s in the U.S. and Mexico, “chile” was the usual written form for a hot pepper while “chili” referred to a hot-pepper sauce to which beans were commonly added, With meat also mixed in, the dish was called chili con carne: “chili” for the sauce and bean combination, “con” for “with,” and “carne” for “meat” (linked to “carnivore”). As appreciation of one or another type of piquant chile and chili concoctions increased around the world, there evolved in the U.K. and Europe the spelling variation “chilli.” Today, all three forms are practically interchangeable for such products.

Let’s now consider the South American country called Chile. Its name is not related to the hot pepper source. This word, pronounced “chee-lay,” is from a different indigenous language (Mapuche) with the meaning “edge of the land” as appropriate to the country’s being mostly a narrow 4,000km long coastal area bordered to the west by the Pacific Ocean and to the east by the Andes Mountain Range, and between Peru to the north and the ocean-bordered southern tip of the continent.
The word pepper, as originally denoting the piquant table seasoning shaken or ground over a plate of food, is derived from the Latin term for small berries from a plant called “piper” (pronounced like “pee-pair”). When explorer Christopher Columbus first arrived in the Caribbean area, he was introduced to jalapeños, the taste of which reminded him of the sharpness of the food-enhancing cracked-open small “piper” berries as used in Spain. His taste association thus led to the fleshy-walled, tube-like fruit also being called “piper” with similar application to the English equivalent “pepper.”

As such zesty peppers from America gained popularity in Spanish cuisine, some prominent person with a knowledge of Latin (common among nobility of the 1600-1700s) who, being quite taken by the various colorful hues of the fruits from deep green to bright red and glowing shades in between, may have remarked, “Quales pigmenta bella!” (What pretty colors!). Thus, a common aspect of “piper” and “pigmenta” likely meshed to yield Spanish descriptives for a chile pepper as “pimento” and “pimiento.”