It’s in the shaker on your table next to the salt. Or maybe in a tall, wooden mill waiting to be ground onto a salad or into a dish. It is boringly commonplace, and often not even mentioned when people are listing the spices they use. Pepper.
As everyone but me already knew, pepper (piper nigrum) is from the family piperaceae, cultivated for its fruit – the peppercorn. The fruit itself is a stone fruit (drupe) which is dark red and holds a stone with a single seed – a peppercorn.
The word pepper ultimately comes from the Sanskrit word, “pippali,” which means long pepper (not to be confused with Long Pepper, an alternative to black pepper). That the word comes from Sanskrit makes sense when we understand that pepper is native to the Malabar coast of India. And while it is grown in abundance there, the country with the largest annual production of pepper is Vietnam.
Its spiciness comes from the chemical compound piperine, which is a different kind of spiciness than capsaicin, the spice found in chili peppers.
Black pepper is the most traded spice in the world, and is ubiquitous in the diets of the western world.
That small, red peppercorn is briefly boiled, and then left to dry. The skin shrinks and wrinkles around the seed, and when dried is a whole peppercorn – just like those in your pepper mill. If you were to remove that outer shell, you’d have white pepper. White pepper is often used when making white sauces (who wants black flecks in your bechamel sauce?), though it does have a different flavor profile.
Don’t get pepper confused with long pepper, though it seems the ancient Romans did, referring to them by the same name (piper.) They can also be found in pink, green, and various shades of white and black.
But black pepper is what I am focusing on today.
Black pepper is the most commonly used spice, and its history goes back well into antiquity. Its use and cultivation is recorded more than four thousand years ago, and it’s safe to assume it predates recorded history.
Being used in some cultures and places as a medicine as well as a food spice, peppercorns were found stuffed into the nostrils of Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II as part of the mummification rituals.
As a spice it spread through the Greek world and then into the Roman world. There, its popularity exploded. In the first century BC, Roman natural historian Pliny wrote:
It is quite surprising that the use of pepper has come so much into fashion, seeing that in other substances which we use, it is sometimes their sweetness, and sometimes their appearance that has attracted our notice; whereas, pepper has nothing in it that can plead as a recommendation to either fruit or berry, its only desirable quality being a certain pungency; and yet it is for this that we import it all the way from India! Who was the first to make trial of it as an article of food? and who, I wonder, was the man that was not content to prepare himself by hunger only for the satisfying of a greedy appetite? (Wikipedia)
The cause of my writing this exploration of pepper was my pondering the same question Pliny had asked more than two millennia ago. Who first used this?
As I have noted elsewhere in the past, the harvesting of grains for human food goes back tens of thousands of years. Archaeological digs have revealed lentils and wheat residue that had been ground and cooked on a rock in the pre-pottery neolithic. Our “caveman” ancestors were eating meals that we’d recognize today. And I would be surprised if they didn’t seek various plants for seasoning and flavor enhancement.
When Pepper? I don’t know, and I doubt we can know, but the discovery of pepper and its use preceded record keeping. Maybe when writing was first developed, pepper was so ubiquitous that they forgot to write it down.
Forgetting about pepper isn’t unusual. Way back in my early days as a merchant sailor, a ship I sailed in ran out of pepper in the middle of an ocean passage. These were the white and red cans of ground pepper that are ubiquitous in just about every commercial kitchen in the world. The mess steward went to the pantry to get a fresh can to refill the table shakers, and none were to be found.
This happened because an incompetent chief steward simply copied the food provisioning order the previous steward had used, rather then actually inventorying, and pepper hadn’t been on that list. If you think pepper is boring and unimportant, climb into my head and watch the reruns of irate shipmates threatening violence upon the man, and grumbling for the rest of the passage as we passed around the one last shaker of pepper amongst the 34 of us, all the while everyone challenging any excessive use by others. (Rumors had it that the officer’s ward room had pepper, but no one wanted to face the wrath of the Captain if caught stealing any).
The most asked question during that entire voyage was, “How can you run out of pepper?”
More recently I was looking to add more greens to my diet and picked up a large bag of kale. This worked well stuffed into soups and potages, but in trying to eat it alone I arrived at steaming it until tender, and then seasoning it with salt and pepper, along with a little lemon juice. It was quite delicious. The pepper chiefly stood out, and it made me wonder about the question above: Who tried it first?
Had prehistoric humans tried to eat it like a berry? Were the first pots ever made used to boil the drupes as preparation for drying? Were they chewing the seeds while green?
What was that like the first time some ancient cook pounded the peppercorns into powder and sprinkled it on his pita sandwich?
But it is easy to picture the others trying it out. That first bite of what was formally some plain meal, like lentils and wheat berries. “MMMMM, Thag. That good flavor! Very pungent!”
Thag: “Glad you like it Dad, now can I borrow the wheel tonight?”
Drok: “Sorry, kid. The wheel won’t be invented for another thousand years.”
Whether running out of pepper or trying out new dishes, pepper is a welcome and wanted spice, even if we sometimes forget about it.