Few ingredients have been adopted as completely or as quickly as the chilli. It reached kitchens across three continents within a few generations, and the reasons are agricultural as much as culinary.
It grows almost anywhere warm
The plant is undemanding, tolerates poor soil, matures in a single season and produces heavily from a small area.
That meant a household could grow its own supply rather than buying it, which no traded spice from a distant region allowed.
Local cultivation removed both cost and dependency, and a spice that costs nothing to obtain is adopted far faster than one that has to be imported.
Seeds travel better than plants or produce
Chilli seeds are small, dry, numerous and remain viable for a long time, so they moved easily along shipping routes as an incidental cargo.
Anyone who received a single fruit received dozens of seeds, and a crop could be established anywhere the climate allowed without further supply.
This is a different mechanism from spices that had to be shipped repeatedly, since the chilli only needed to arrive once in any given place.
Drying preserves it without loss of potency
The compound responsible for heat is stable and does not degrade appreciably during drying or long storage.
Dried chillies therefore keep for a season or longer, which converted a perishable summer crop into a year-round pantry staple.
Drying also concentrates the fruit and develops additional flavour, so the preserved form was not merely a fallback but a distinct ingredient in its own right.
It filled a role that already existed
Many cuisines already used pungent ingredients such as pepper, mustard and ginger, so there was an established place in the cooking for something sharp.
The chilli filled that role more cheaply and more intensely, and it could be scaled up or down easily because a single fruit carries so much heat.
Adoption did not require anyone to change how they cooked, which is the condition under which new ingredients spread fastest.
Variety allowed local specialisation
The plant cross-pollinates readily and responds quickly to selection, so distinct local varieties developed within a few decades of arrival.
Regions selected for the qualities they wanted, some for heat, some for colour, some for fruitiness or smokiness, producing chillies that suited their own cooking.
Within a couple of centuries the crop was so thoroughly localised that many cuisines treat their own varieties as indigenous, which is the strongest evidence of how completely it was absorbed.