Ingredients · Spice

Paprika

Capsicum annuum · Solanaceae (nightshade family)

Paprika
Dried sweet red peppers, ground. It is in twenty-eight products here mostly for colour and body — paprika gives a rub or a stew its red without adding heat, and it carries a soft, sweet pepper flavour that fills in the gaps between louder spices. The shop carries three: sweet, Hungarian, and smoked. The smoked kind is a different thing entirely, dried over oak fires rather than in the sun, and it will take over a dish if you let it.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partFruit
KindSpice
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromHungary, Spain
TasteSweet red pepper, no heat, vivid colour; the smoked one adds deep oak smoke

How to use it

Stir it into warm fat off the heat — paprika scorches quickly and turns bitter, and burnt paprika cannot be rescued. Chicken paprikash and goulash. Dusted over devilled eggs and potato salad. In a barbecue rub, where it does the colour work. Spanish rice, chorizo, patatas bravas. Smoked paprika in beans, lentils and anything that wants to taste like it was cooked over a fire.

With food

Sour cream and yogurt. Chicken, pork and sausage. Potato, onion and bell pepper. Eggs. White beans and chickpeas. Tomato. Butter.

With spices

Garlic and onion. Caraway, in the Hungarian direction. Cumin and oregano, in the Spanish and Mexican one. Black pepper and salt. Cayenne where you want the colour to come with heat.

With tea

Assam, Ceylon and English Breakfast against a paprika-rich meal; Lapsang Souchong or hojicha alongside the smoked kind, which meets smoke with smoke.

Its story

Where it comes from

The plant is American. Capsicum peppers were being eaten in Mexico around 7000 BC and cultivated before 3500 BC; Spanish and Portuguese traders carried them to Europe in the sixteenth century, and they reached Italy by 1526, Germany by 1543 and Hungary by 1569. Hungary's paprika comes from Szeged and Kalocsa and is sold in named grades. Spain's smoked pimenton comes from La Vera in Extremadura, where the peppers are dried over oak and holm-oak fires for ten to fifteen days and stirred daily, under a protected-designation board. The product titles name Hungary and Spain; lot origin is unconfirmed without the supplier's record.

What happened

A New World pepper that became the national spice of two European countries. The story goes that Columbus handed the first peppers to the monks of an Extremaduran monastery, who dried them over oak — sources disagree on which monastery, so it is best told as a story. Hungarians are said to have met the plant through Ottoman rule and to have first called it torokbors, Turkish pepper, and grown it as a garden ornamental. The word paprika is Hungarian, a diminutive of the Serbo-Croatian papar, pepper, from Latin piper; it first appears in English in The Times in 1830, describing paprika soup. The first documented recipe for chicken paprikash is in Istvan Czifray's 1830 Hungarian National Cookbook. In Szeged in the early 1930s, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi used paprika as the source from which he and Joseph Svirbely showed that hexuronic acid was vitamin C; he took the 1937 Nobel Prize for it. And on the first pages of Dracula, Jonathan Harker eats paprika hendl and notes: get recipe for Mina.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

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