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| '''Black pepper''' (''Piper nigrum'') is a ] ] in the family '']'', cultivated for its fruit, which is usually dried and used as a ] and ]. The same plant |
'''Black pepper''' (''Piper nigrum'') is a ] ] in the family '']'', cultivated for its fruit, which is usually dried and used as a ] and ]. The berries of the same plant are also used to produce '''white pepper''' and '''green pepper'''. Black pepper is native to southern ] and is extensively cultivated there and elsewhere in tropical regions. The fruit is a small ] five millimetres in diameter, dark red when fully mature, containing a single ]. | ||
| Dried and ground pepper is one of the most common spices in European ] and its descendants, having been known and prized since antiquity for its flavour and its use as a ]. The spiciness of black pepper is due to the ] ]. Ground black peppercorn, usually referred to simply as "pepper", may be found on nearly every dinner table in some parts of the world, often alongside its frequent companion, ]. | Dried and ground pepper is one of the most common spices in European ] and its descendants, having been known and prized since antiquity for its flavour and its use as a ]. The spiciness of black pepper is due to the ] ]. Ground black peppercorn, usually referred to simply as "pepper", may be found on nearly every dinner table in some parts of the world, often alongside its frequent companion, ]. | ||
Revision as of 03:18, 15 November 2005
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Black pepper (Piper nigrum) is a flowering vine in the family Piperaceae, cultivated for its fruit, which is usually dried and used as a spice and seasoning. The berries of the same plant are also used to produce white pepper and green pepper. Black pepper is native to southern India and is extensively cultivated there and elsewhere in tropical regions. The fruit is a small drupe five millimetres in diameter, dark red when fully mature, containing a single seed.
Dried and ground pepper is one of the most common spices in European cuisine and its descendants, having been known and prized since antiquity for its flavour and its use as a medicine. The spiciness of black pepper is due to the chemical piperine. Ground black peppercorn, usually referred to simply as "pepper", may be found on nearly every dinner table in some parts of the world, often alongside its frequent companion, table salt.
The word pepper is derived from the Sanskrit pippali , via the Latin piper and Old English pipor. The Latin word is also the source of German pfeffer, French poivre, and other similar forms. In the 16th century, pepper started referring to New World chile peppers as well. Pepper was used in a figurative sense meaning "spirit" or "energy" at least as far back as the 1840s; in the early 20th century, this was shortened to pep.
Types of pepper
Black pepper is produced from the still-green unripe berries of the pepper plant. The berries are cooked briefly in hot water, both to clean them and to prepare them for drying. The heat ruptures cell walls in the fruit, speeding the work of browning enzymes during drying. The berries are dried in the sun or by machine for several days, during which the fruit around the seed shrinks and darkens into a thin, wrinkled black layer around the seed. Once dried, the fruits are called black peppercorns.
White pepper consists of the seed only, with the fruit removed. This is often accomplished by allowing fully ripe berries to soak in water for about a week, during which time the flesh of the fruit becomes somewhat softened and decomposed. Rubbing then removes what remains of the fruit, and the naked seed is dried. Alternative processes are used for removing the outer fruit from the seed, including removal of the outer layer from black pepper produced from unripe berries.
In Europe and parts of Asia, white pepper is more common than black on the table and in the kitchen; in the U.S., black pepper predominates and white pepper is mainly used in dishes like light-coloured sauces or mashed potatoes, where ground black pepper would visibly stand out. There is disagreement regarding which is generally more spicy. They do have differing flavours, since the outer fruit layer of the berry contains some compounds not found in the seed.
Green pepper, like black, is made from the unripe berries. Dried green peppercorns are treated in a manner that retains the green colour, such as treatment with sulphur dioxide or freeze-drying. Pickled peppercorns, also green, are unripe berries preserved in brine or vinegar. Fresh, unpreserved green pepper berries, largely unknown in the West, are used in some Asian cuisine, particularly Thai cuisine. Their flavour has been described as piquant and fresh, with a bright aroma. They decay quickly if not dried or preserved.
A rarely seen product called pink pepper consists of ripe red pepper berries preserved in brine and vinegar. This pink pepper is different from the more-common dried "pink peppercorns", which are the fruits of a plant from a different family, the Brazilian pepper tree, Schinus terebinthifolius.
Peppercorns are often categorised under a label describing their region or port of origin. Two well-known types come from India's Malabar Coast, Malabar pepper and Tellicherry pepper. Tellicherry is purportedly a higher-grade pepper, made from larger, riper berries. Sarawak pepper is produced in the Malaysian portion of Borneo, and Lampong pepper on Indonesia's island of Sumatra. White Muntok pepper is another Indonesian product, from Bangka Island.
The pepper plant
The pepper plant is a perennial woody vine growing to four metres tall on supporting trees, poles, or trellises. It is a spreading vine, rooting readily where trailing stems touch the ground. The leaves are alternate, entire, five to ten centimetres long and three to six centimetres broad. The flowers are small, produced on pendulous spikes four to eight centimetres long at the leaf nodes, the spikes lengthening to seven to 15 centimetres as the fruit matures.
Black pepper is grown in moist, organic-rich soil with good drainage, not too dry nor liable to flooding. The plants are propagated by cuttings about 40 to 50 centimetres long, tied up to neighbouring trees or climbing frames at distances of about two metres apart; trees with rough bark are favoured over those with smooth bark as the pepper plants climb rough bark more readily. Competing plants are cleared away, leaving only sufficient trees to provide shade and permit free ventilation. The roots are covered in leaf mulch and manure, and the shoots are trimmed twice a year. On dry soils the young plants require watering every other day during the dry season for the first three years. The plants bear fruit from the fourth or fifth year, and typically continue to bear fruit for seven years. The cuttings are usually cultivars, selected both for yield and quality of fruit.
A single stem will bear 20 to 30 fruiting spikes. The harvest begins as soon as one or two berries at the base of the spikes begin to turn red, and before the fruit is mature, but when full grown and still hard; if allowed to ripen, the berries lose pungency, and ultimately fall off and are lost. The spikes are collected in bags or baskets and then spread out to dry in the sun, and the peppercorns then stripped off the spikes.
History
Pepper has been used as a spice in India since prehistoric times. It was probably first cultivated on the Malabar coast of India, in what is now the state of Kerala.
The ancient history of black pepper is often interlinked with (and confused with) that of long pepper, the dried fruit of closely related Piper longum. The Romans knew of both and often referred to either as just "piper". In fact, it was not until the discovery of the New World and of chile peppers that the popularity of long pepper entirely declined. Chile peppers, some of which when dried are similar in shape and taste to long pepper, were easier to grow in a variety of locations more convenient to Europe.
Until well after the Middle Ages, virtually all of the black pepper found in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa travelled there from India's Malabar region. By the 16th century, pepper was also being grown in Java, Sunda, Sumatra, Madagascar, Malaysia, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, but these areas traded mainly with China, or used the pepper locally. Ports in the Malabar area also served as a stop-off point for much of the trade in other spices from farther east in the Indian Ocean.
Ancient times
Black peppercorns were found lodged in the nostrils of Ramesses II, placed there as part of his mummification rituals shortly after his death in 1213 BCE. Little else is known about the use of pepper in ancient Egypt, nor of the route it took from India to the Nile.
Pepper (both long and black) was known in Greece at least as early as the 4th century BCE, though it was probably an uncommon and expensive item that only the very rich could afford. Trade routes of the time were by land, or in ships which hugged the coastlines of the Arabian Sea. This meant that long pepper, growing in the north-western part of India, was more accessible than the black pepper from further south—this trade advantage, plus long pepper's greater spiciness, probably made black pepper something of a poor relative at the time.
By the time of the early Roman Empire—especially after Rome's conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE—open-ocean crossing of the Arabian Sea directly to India's Malabar Coast was near routine. Details of this trading across the Indian Ocean have peen passed down in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. According to the Roman geographer Strabo, the early Empire sent a fleet of around 120 ships on an annual one-year trip to India and back. The fleet timed its travel across the Arabian Sea to take advantage of the predictable Monsoon winds. Returning from India, the ships travelled up the Red Sea, then the cargo was carried overland to the Nile River, barged to Alexandria, and shipped from there to Italy and Rome. The rough geographical outlines of this same trade route would dominate the pepper trade into Europe for a millennium and a half to come.
With ships sailing directly to the Malabar coast, black pepper was now travelling a shorter trade route than long pepper, and the prices reflected it. Pliny the Elder's Natural History tells us the prices in Rome around 77 CE: "Long pepper ... is fifteen denarii per pound, while that of white pepper is seven, and of black, four." Pliny also complains "there is no year in which India does not drain the Roman Empire of fifty million sesterces," and further moralises on pepper:
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?
Black pepper was a well-known and widespread, if expensive, seasoning in the Roman Empire. Apicius' De re coquinaria, a 3rd-century cookbook probably based at least partly on one from the 1st century CE, includes pepper in a majority of its recipes. Edward Gibbon wrote, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that pepper was "a favourite ingredient of the most expensive Roman cookery".
Postclassical Europe
Pepper was so valuable that it was often used as collateral or even currency. The taste for pepper (or the appreciation of its monetary value) was passed on to those who would see Rome fall. It is said that Alaric the Visigoth demanded from Rome a ransom of more than a ton of pepper when he besieged the city in 410. After the Fall of Rome, others took over the critical central legs of the spice trade, first Byzantium then Arabs. By the end of the Dark Ages, the central portions of the spice trade were firmly under Islamic control. Once into the Mediterranean, the trade was largely monopolised by Italian powers, especially Venice and Genoa. The rise of these city-states was funded in large part by the spice trade.
A riddle authored by Saint Aldhelm, a 7th-century Bishop of Sherborne, sheds some light on black pepper's role in England at that time:
- I am black on the outside, clad in a wrinkled cover,
- Yet within I bear a burning marrow.
- I season delicacies, the banquets of kings, and the luxuries of the table,
- Both the sauces and the tenderized meats of the kitchen.
- But you will find in me no quality of any worth,
- Unless your bowels have been rattled by my gleaming marrow.
It is commonly believed that during the Middle Ages pepper was used to conceal the taste of partially rotten meat. There is no evidence to support this claim, and historians view it as highly unlikely: in the Middle Ages, pepper was a luxury item, affordable only to the wealthy, who certainly had unspoiled meat available as well. Similarly, the belief that pepper was widely used as a preservative is questionable: it is true that piperine, the compound that gives pepper its spiciness, has some antimicrobial properties, but at the concentrations present when pepper is used as a spice, the effect is small. Salt is a much more effective preservative, and salted meats were common fare, especially in winter. Pepper and other spices probably did play a role in improving the taste of long-preserved meats.
The Portuguese proved unable to maintain their stranglehold on the spice trade for long, however. The old Arab and Venetian trade networks successfully smuggled enormous quantities of spices through the patchy Portuguese blockade, and pepper once again flowed through Alexandria and Italy, as well as around Africa. In the 17th century, the Portuguese lost almost all of their valuable Indian Ocean possessions to the Dutch or English. The pepper ports of Malabar fell to the Dutch in 1661–1663.
As pepper supplies into Europe increased, the price of pepper declined (though the total value of the import trade generally did not). Pepper, which in the early Middle Ages had been an item exclusively for the rich, started to become more of an everyday seasoning among those with more average means. Today, pepper accounts for one-fifth of the world's spice trade.
China
It is possible that black pepper was known in China in the 2nd century BCE, if poetic reports regarding an explorer named Tang Meng (唐蒙) are correct. Sent by Emperor Wu to what is now south-west China, Tang Meng is said to have come across something called jujiang or "sauce-betel". He was told it came from the markets of Shu, an area in what is now the Sichuan province. The traditional view among historians is that "sauce-betel" is a sauce made from betel leaves, but arguments have been made that it actually refers to pepper, either long or black.
In the 3rd century CE, black pepper makes its first certain appearance in Chinese texts as hujiao or "foreign pepper". It does not appear to have been widely known at the time, failing to appear in a 4th-century work describing a wide variety of spices from beyond China's southern border, including long pepper. By the 12th century, however, black pepper has become a popular ingredient in dishes of the weathy and powerful, sometimes taking the place of China's native Sichuan pepper (the tongue-numbing dried fruit of an unrelated plant).
Marco Polo testifies to pepper's popularity in 13th-century China when he relates what he is told of its consumption in the city of Kinsay (Zhejiang): "... Messer Marco heard it stated by one of the Great Kaan's officers of customs that the quantity of pepper introduced daily for consumption into the city of Kinsay amounted to 43 loads, each load being equal to 223 lbs." Marco Polo is not considered a very reliable source regarding China, and this second-hand data may be even more suspect, but if this estimated 10,000 pounds (4,500 kg) a day for one city is anywhere near the truth, China's pepper imports may have dwarfed Europe's.
Pepper as medicine
Like all eastern spices, pepper was historically both a seasoning and a medicine. Long pepper, being stronger, was often the preferred medication, but both were used.
The 5th-century Syriac Book of Medicines prescribes pepper (or perhaps long pepper) for such illnesses as constipation, diarrhoea, earache, gangrene, heart disease, hernia, hoarseness, indigestion, insect bites, insomnia, joint pain, liver problems, lung disease, oral abcesses, sunburn, tooth decay, and toothaches. Various sources from the 5th century onward also recommend pepper to treat eye problems, often by applying salves or poultices made with pepper directly to the eye. There is no current medical evidence that any of these treatments has any benefit; pepper applied directly to the eye would be quite uncomfortable and possibly damaging.
Pepper has long been believed to cause sneezing; this is still believed true today. Some sources say that piperine irritates the nostrils, causing the sneezing ; some say that it is just the effect of the fine dust in ground pepper, and some say that pepper is not in fact a very effective sneeze-producer at all. Few if any controlled studies have been carried out to answer the question.
Flavour
Pepper gets its spicy heat mostly from the piperine compound, which is found both in the outer fruit and in the seed. Refined piperine is perceived as being about one per cent as hot as the capsaicin in chile peppers. The outer fruit layer, left on black pepper, also contains important odour-contributing terpenes including pinene, sabinene, limonene, caryophyllene, and linalool, which give citrusy, woody, and floral notes. These scents are mostly missing in white pepper, which is stripped of the fruit layer. White pepper can gain some different odours (including musty notes) from its longer fermentation stage.
Pepper loses flavour and aroma through evaporation, so airtight storage helps preserve pepper's original spiciness longer. Pepper can also lose flavour when exposed to light, which can transform piperine into nearly tasteless isochavicine. Once ground, pepper's aromatics can evaporate quickly; most culinary sources recommend grinding whole peppercorns immediately before use for this reason. Handheld pepper mills (or pepper grinders), which mechanically grind or crush whole peppercorns, are used for this, sometimes instead of pepper shakers, dispensers of pre-ground pepper. Spice mills such as pepper mills were found in European kitchens as early as the 14th century, but the mortar and pestle used earlier for crushing pepper remained a popular method for centuries after as well.
World trade
Peppercorns are, by monetary value, the most widely traded spice in the world, accounting for 20 per cent of all spice imports in 2002. The price of pepper can be volatile, and this figure fluctuates a great deal year to year; for example, pepper made up 39 per cent of all spice imports in 1998. By weight, slightly more chile peppers are traded worldwide than peppercorns.
Vietnam has recently become the world's largest producer and exporter of pepper. Major producers include Vietnam (85,000 long tons in 2003), Indonesia (67,000 tons), India (65,000 tons), Brazil (35,000 tons), Malaysia (22,000 tons), Sri Lanka (12,750 tons), Thailand, and China. Vietnam dominates the export market, using almost none of its production domestically. In 2003, Vietnam exported 82,000 tons of pepper, Indonesia 57,000 tons, Brazil 37,940 tons, Malaysia 18,500 tons, and India 17,200 tons.
Notes
- Pippali is Sanskrit for long pepper, in fact. Black pepper is marica. Greek and Latin borrowed pippali to refer to either.
- Douglas Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary entries for pepper and pep. Retrieved 13 November 2005.
- See Thai Ingredients Glossary. Retrieved 6 November 2005.
- Ochef, Using fresh green peppercorns. Retrieved 6 November 2005.
- Pepper varieties information from A Cook's Wares. Retrieved 6 November 2005.
- Dalby p. 93.
- From Bostock and Riley's 1855 translation. Text online.
- Translation from Turner, p 94. The riddle's answer is of course pepper.
- Dalby p. 156; also Turner pp. 108-109, though Turner does go on to discuss spices (not pepper specifically) being used to disguise the taste of partially spoiled wine or ale.
- Template:Journal reference. Full text. "Spices, which are used as integral ingredients in cuisine or added as flavouring agents to foods, are present in insufficient quantities for their antimicrobial properties to be significant."
- Jaffee p. 10.
- Dalby pp. 74-75. The argument that jujiang was long pepper goes back to the 4th century CE botanical writings of Ji Han; Hui-lin Li's 1979 translation of and commentary on Ji Han's work makes the case that it was piper nigrum.
- Dalby p. 77.
- Translation from The Travels of Marco Polo: The Complete Yule-Cordier Edition, Vol. 2, Dover. ISBN 0486275876. p. 204.
- Turner p. 160.
- Turner p. 171.
- U.S. Library of Congress Science Reference Services "Everyday Mysteries", Why does pepper make you sneeze?. Retrieved November 12, 2005.
- McGee p. 428.
- ibid.
- . ISBN 0600602354.
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- Data from Multi Commodity Exchange of India, Ltd. Retrieved 6 November 2005.
References
- Dalby, Andrew (Oct 1, 2002). Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices, 89. Google Print. ISBN 0520236742 (accessed October 25, 2005). Also available in print from University of California Press.
- . ISBN 0-375-70705-0.
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