Five things in your kitchen that arrived by ship

We tend to keep history at arm's length, somewhere behind glass, dated and labelled. But the archipelago's history was never really about kings and treaties. It was about water, and wind, and the price two strangers could agree on at the edge of a harbour. And a surprising amount of it is sitting in your kitchen right now.

Here are five things I would ask you to look at again.

The chilli. This is the one that surprises people. The chilli is not native to this part of the world at all. It crossed an ocean in the holds of ships, out of the Americas, and reached these ports only a few centuries ago, carried by traders who had picked it up on the far side of the globe. A cook a thousand years ago in this region had never tasted one. The heat we now think of as the deepest note of our food is, historically speaking, a fairly recent guest who never left.

The nutmeg. For a long stretch, the small Banda Islands were the only place on earth this seed grew. People sailed halfway round the world for it, and fortunes and misfortunes both turned on it. When you grate a little into a sauce, you are handling something that was once, gram for gram, among the most argued over substances on the sea.

Tamarind. Even its name carries its journey. The word comes to us through Arabic, meaning, more or less, the date of India. The sourness we reach for so casually was once a traveller's ingredient, moving with merchants across the Indian Ocean until it settled here so thoroughly that we forget it ever knocked at the door.

The clove. Like nutmeg, a child of a few small islands in the east, and like nutmeg, a reason ships were built and voyages risked. There are records of cloves reaching courts thousands of miles away long before anyone in those courts could have pointed to where they grew.

Coffee. The bean did not begin here either. It came along the same trade routes as everything else, through the hands of the go betweens I find myself always writing about, the pilots and translators and harbour clerks whose names survive only in a ledger, if they survive at all. The morning cup is the far end of a very long supply line, most of it forgotten.

None of this is meant to make dinner feel like a lecture. It is the opposite. I find it a quiet pleasure to know that an ordinary meal is a meeting point, that the wok in front of you is holding ingredients that would once have been amazed to find themselves in the same pot.

The monsoon did not only move goods. It moved tastes, and habits, and the shape of an evening meal. It is still doing it. Every kitchen in this part of the world is a small museum that never closed, and the admission is whatever you were going to cook anyway.