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When I think of Ceylon — Sri Lanka — I think of tea, but that’s because I wasn’t alive 150 years ago. In the 1860s, coffee was the island’s most important crop. Coffee leaf rust, a fungus, put paid to the coffee, but only after a global downturn in coffee prices, and planters switched to tea. The rust, however, is not the reason the Brits drink tea rather than coffee, just one of the things I learned from Stuart McCook, who has studied the history of coffee leaf rust and what it might hold for the future.

Notes

1. Stuart McCook’s book is Coffee Is Not Forever: A Global History of the Coffee Leaf Rust.
2. The disease is no stranger to news media. Coffee Rust Is Going to Ruin Your Morning is a recent example that actually says nothing about your morning joe — but does blame rust for Britain’s preference for tea.
3. There is a transcript, thanks to the show’s supporters.
4. Banner photo shows coffee leaf rust inside a leaf, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia License

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I got an email from careme.co.nz and absolutely had to follow up. What was Carême, perhaps the first great French chef, doing in New Zealand? Turns out, he is Jo Crabb’s hero, so of course that’s what she named her cooking classes and her website. I wanted to find out more, and Jo was kind enough to agree to chat over, I must admit, a slightly dodgy connection.

(I can’t believe I am complaining, but I am. When you can talk forever, for free, halfway around the world, that ought to be enough. But no; I want pristine audio quality too.)

Jo mentioned two local foods — abalone and cabbage tree — that I was not familiar with. Well, I knew of the existence of abalone, but not of pāua, which is the Māori name for the species. Jo said they were absolutely delicious, which seems to be confirmed by the fact that, despite stringent regulation, “there is an extensive black market,“ according to Wikipedia. And here’s an older piece from BBC News: Why abalone is New Zealand’s catch of the day.

Cabbage tree — tī kōuka to the Māori — turns out to be Cordyline australis, which I recognised immediately despite having no idea that it was both edible and useful. Although it is endemic to New Zealand, you see it almost everywhere growing as an ornamental. Unfortunately, in its native home it has been beset by a mystery disease that started to wipe out populations in 1987. Although the cause is now known, a government site says there is still no cure, and exhorts people to keep planting more young cabbage trees.

Notes

1. Jo Crabb’s website is Carême – Cooking classes in Martinborough. She also has a book — My Two Heavens: A Life in French Food, from Martinborough to Montjaux — available for Kindle.
2. Episode transcript is now available.
3. Photos from Jo Crabb. The banner shows students in her Easy French class piping out profiteroles.

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You may be wondering, if you care about these things as I do, why there is a chilli species called Capsicum chinense.

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Think of Szechuan food and you think of hot and spicy, chilli-laden dishes. At least, I do. Chilli pepper is firmly established as the most widely used spice around the world, and nowhere more so than in China. And yet, chillies were unknown in China before about 1570. They arrived by at least three different routes, almost certainly more than once in each area, and found favour with ordinary Chinese people extremely rapidly. The ruling classes were not nearly as taken with them, and by and large failed to understand their importance. That contrast lasted through the first two centuries of the chilli in China, although it did not stop chillies eventually permeating Chinese culture high and low. For the people of Szechuan and Hunan, they became an essential part of their identity.

All this, and much, much more, comes from a new book by Professor Brian Dott, of Whitman College in Washington State. He combed through ancient texts and modern to trace the history of chillies in China and how they became such an essential element of life for so many people.

Notes

1. Brian Dott’s book The Chile Pepper in China is published by Columbia University Press. This link will help you buy it from an independent bookshop in the US and this one in the UK. Both probably ship elsewhere too.
2. You can download a transcript, thanks to the generosity of people who support the show financially. Think about joining them.
3. I have no idea whether this version of Spicy Girls is a good one, but I thought I would share it anyway.
4. Banner photo, by Xinhua, shows farmers in Gansu Province airing drying chillis. I got it here uncredited.

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I’ll be honest, I thought I was pretty savvy about coffee taxonomy knowing that there were two kinds, arabica and robusta. Not surprisingly, perhaps, a research paper about “Coffea stenophylla and C. affinis, the Forgotten Coffee Crop Species of West Africa” caught my attention. And of course, as I should have known, there are scores of different coffee species. What is particularly intriguing about C. stenophylla, however, is that in its day people considered it a very fine coffee indeed. A 1925 monograph recorded that “The beans are said, by both the natives and the French merchants, to be superior to those of all other species.”

So what happened to it? And what are the chances of a revival? Jeremy Haggar, of Greenwich University, told me.

Notes

1. The original paper is Lost and Found: Coffea stenophylla and C. affinis, the Forgotten Coffee Crop Species of West Africa.
2. As I mentioned at the end of the episode, I have a page of special, topic based collections. Coffee is one of them.
3. Banner image is the original painting of C. stenophylla as reproduced in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine in 1896. The cover photograph is from Kew, and shows C. stenophylla growing in Trinidad. The man, we are helpfully told, is 1.72 m tall.

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