Black Pepper is more than it is cracked up to be
Everybody is using it
No spice is as common and necessary to cooks or diners as pepper. That nearly everyone everywhere uses it ends the common knowledge. It’s origin, the varieties, the colors all add to the confusion of what is pepper.
Since we were kids and got a snootful of black pepper and sneezed aplenty, we have known of black pepper. You might be surprised to learn there is, from the same plant, white and green peppercorns.
Snakes: Why did it have to be snakes
“In book 17 of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, pepper is said to come from groves of trees in India ‘guarded’ by poisonous serpents. In order to harvest the pepper, the trees have to be burned, driving the snakes away and in the process turning the originally white fruit black.”[1]
Pepper wasn’t particularly easy to harvest in the first place, add snakes and you can keep competition away and keep scarcity high. More than other spices, pepper was so valuable that in some cases it served as money. It fits the criteria: portable, divisible, and acceptable. Peppercorns might have lacked in durability, but that’s easy to overlook.
Fanciful stories exist to explain, or perhaps scare competition, the collection of and difficulty with gathering spice. Frankincense was guarded by snakes, cassia protected by giant batlike creatures, and cinnamon was in inaccessible Arabian mountains. Birds used cinnamon for their nests and were tempted with meat to eat. When they carried the meat to their nests, the weight made the nests fall and the cinnamon gathered. How the impassible was made passible isn’t explained.[2]
Where Did It Come From?
Black pepper comes from a vine-like bush which can reach over 20 feet tall. When grown for cultivation, it is kept short enough to harvest with ladders. The vine is native to India, but currently Viet Nam leads the world in pepper production and exportation at 34%.[3]
Some Science
Pepper gets its heat from an alkaloid called peperine. The black pepper we use grows on the plant piper nigrum. From that plant we get the well known black peppercorns. It also produces white peppercorns and green peppercorns. White pepper is frequently preferred by chefs when seasoning white sauces or soups to keep black specks out of the food. It has a slightly milder flavor. Green peppercorns can be dried or brined. When brined, they are left whole and are about the size of non-pariel capers, but they don’t taste like them! Brined green peppercorns are used mostly in sauces for meat dishes or as garnishes in charcuterie dishes.
What is Black and White and Red All Over
All peppercorns start green.*
To obtain the black peppercorns, the immature green drupes which grow on vines, are picked and a natural enzyme on the plant ferments the outside of the peppercorn, actually a small fruit, and the skin falls away and the berry turns black and dries.
White peppercorns require the fruit to mature and turn red. Then they are picked, soaked in water for several days in which the outside falls away and the remaining white fruit is left to dry. Green peppercorns can be freeze-dried or treated with sulfur dioxide to preserve the green color. Some are brined. Green peppercorns maintain the initial heat of pepper but follow with a fresh, almost citric note. If not preserved or turned into black pepper, green peppercorns spoil rapidly.
What To Do With It
Black pepper tastes best when freshly ground. Don’t buy that stuff in the tin can at the store. Buy a proper pepper grinder and it will last for year. I purchased mine in 1991 and it’s still going strong.
I do like the flavor of green peppercorns in a rich beef sauce. I also like to press cracked black pepper into steaks destined for the cast iron pan or the grill. The contrast between char and pepper is very nice.
Here is a link from Amazon for brined green peppercorns.
*In the height of fru-fru cooking in the 1980s, pink peppercorns were something of a rage. In Florida, there grows a tree that produces what appear to be pink peppercorns. The berries, when dried, are almost hollow and I find them rather flavorless. They are pretty but that is, in my opinion, not enough.
The real trouble came when people eager to earn a buck substituted a pink berry from a plant containing a toxin similar to that in poison ivy. Many people reported wide ranges of reactions. Here is a website for more information if you live in a subtropical zone and wonder. http://yougrowgirl.com/foraging-pink-peppercorns/
[1] “Spices and Late-Medieval European Ideas of Scarcity and Value
Paul Freedman
U of Chicago Press
Vol 80, No 4 (Oct 2005) pp 1209-1227
[2] “Spices and Late-Medieval European Ideas of Scarcity and Value
Paul Freedman
U of Chicago Press
Vol 80, No 4 (Oct 2005) pp 1209-1227
[3] https://en.wikipedia[dot]org/wiki/Black_pepper
Motor City is my background. A grandfather and his eldest son and two of my uncle’s sons work in the auto industry in and around Detroit. They each paid their bills and raised their families but none had cash hiding in the couch cushions. I ate with my grandparents and aunt and uncle and cousins often as a kid. We never wanted for food and the cooking was a mix of Polish and German, my side, and Portuguese, my aunt’s side. Pressures of assimilation had removed most of the family cultural culinary signatures but even if it had not, saffron was not an ingredient on the radar of any of my ancestors.