guava

Mesoamerica and northern South America; Psidium guajava, domesticated across the tropical Americas and named from the Taíno guayaba

Carried on Spanish and Portuguese ships through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reaching the Philippines first, then Malaysia and south China, and India and Pakistan by the early seventeenth century; now grown most heavily in India, which was not part of its range at all

India is the largest grower of guava, about four million tonnes of it, from an American fruit that reached the subcontinent only in the seventeenth century. The much-quoted figure of twenty-five million is a different number: FAO counts guavas, mangoes and mangosteens as one category, and that total is mostly mango. The word came with the fruit. Guayaba is Taíno, the language of the Antilles and the first the Spanish met in the Americas, and it survives in every language the fruit travelled into while the people who named it did not. Even the botanical name carries it: guajava is the Taíno word with a Latin ending. Guava is folded into Indian, Filipino and Thai cooking as though native to each, and amrood with chaat masala is not a Mexican dish. Both facts hold. The route was violent and the cuisine that resulted is real.