Black pepper

• 1. Introduction

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  Black pepper was found stuffed into the nostrils of Ramesses II, placed there during the mummification rituals that followed his death in 1213 BCE. How a dried fruit from the Malabar Coast of India reached the Nile remains largely unknown. That single image holds the whole strange story of this spice. A plant called Piper nigrum, a flowering vine in the family Piperaceae, grew into one of the most commonly traded spices on Earth. Its fruit is a drupe, a stonefruit about 5 mm across when ripe, dark red, holding a stone that encloses a single seed. Dried, that drupe becomes the peppercorn. From a perennial woody vine that climbs trees in the Western Ghats came a luxury once prized as black gold. What made a small wrinkled berry valuable enough to ransom a city, fund Italian city-states, and lure ships across the Arabian Sea? And why, of all flavours, did people travel so far for mere pungency?

• 2. Black, White, And Green

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  Black pepper begins as a still-green, unripe drupe. The fruit is cooked briefly in hot water, which cleans it and ruptures cell walls inside. That rupture speeds enzymes that brown the pepper as it dries in sun or machine. Over several days the skin around the seed shrinks into a thin, wrinkled black layer containing melanoidin. Crushing the dried berries yields pepper powder, and extraction can draw out an essential oil.

  White pepper keeps only the seed of the ripe fruit, with the darker skin removed. Removal usually happens through retting, soaking fully ripe red berries in water for about a week until the flesh softens and decomposes. Rubbing strips what remains, and the naked seed is dried. White pepper lacks compounds found in the outer layer of the drupe, so its flavour differs. It appears commonly in Chinese, Thai, and Portuguese cooking, and stands in for black pepper in light-coloured sauces and mashed potatoes where black flecks would show.

  Green pepper, like black, comes from unripe drupes. Treatments such as sulphur dioxide, canning, or freeze-drying hold the green colour. Fresh green drupes appear in Thai and Tamil cuisine, their flavour described as spicy and fresh with a bright aroma. They decay quickly, which makes them unsuitable for international shipping. Red peppercorns are usually ripe drupes preserved in brine and vinegar. None of these should be confused with pink peppercorns, which come from the Peruvian pepper tree, Schinus molle, a member of the cashew family that can trigger anaphylaxis in those with a tree nut allergy.

• 3. The Climbing Vine

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  Up to 4 m in height the pepper plant climbs supporting trees, poles, or trellises, rooting readily where its trailing stems touch the ground. Its leaves are alternate and entire, 5 to 10 cm long and 3 to 6 cm across. Small flowers grow on pendulous spikes 4 to 8 cm long at the leaf nodes. As the fruit matures those spikes lengthen to 7 to 15 cm, and a single stem bears 20 to 30 fruiting spikes.

  Cuttings about 40 to 50 cm long propagate the plant, usually cultivars chosen for both yield and fruit quality. Growers tie them to neighbouring trees or climbing frames roughly 2 m apart. Trees with rough bark are favoured, since pepper vines climb rough bark more readily than smooth. Roots are covered in leaf mulch and manure, shoots are trimmed twice a year, and on dry soil young plants need watering every other day through the dry season for their first three years.

  Fruit arrives only in the fourth or fifth year, then typically for seven years. Harvesting starts when one or two fruits at the base of a spike begin to turn red, before the fruit is fully mature and while still hard. Wait too long and the fruits lose pungency, then fall off and are lost. Pepper grows best in moist, well-drained soil rich in organic matter, below 900 m above sea level, where no commercial pepper has yet been successfully grafted onto wild pepper.

• 4. Black Gold

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  Three thousand pounds of pepper sat among the ransom that Alaric, king of the Visigoths, demanded from Rome when he besieged the city in the fifth century. The spice had grown so valuable that it served as collateral and even currency. Greece knew pepper at least as early as the fourth century BCE, an uncommon and expensive item only the very rich could afford. Traders called peppercorns black gold and used them as commodity money. That legacy survives in the term peppercorn rent, a token payment recognised in some Western legal systems for what is essentially a gift.

  After Rome's conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE, open-ocean crossings direct to the Malabar Coast became near routine. The Greek geographer Strabo records that the early empire sent a fleet of around 120 ships each year to India and back, timed to the predictable monsoon winds. Ships returned up the Red Sea, their cargo carried overland or through the Nile-Red Sea canal, barged to Alexandria, then shipped to Italy and Rome.

  Pliny the Elder put hard numbers to the trade. His Natural History, recording Roman prices around 77 CE, says long pepper cost 15 denarii per pound, white pepper seven, and black four. He complained that there was no year in which India did not drain the Roman Empire of 50 million sesterces, citing elsewhere a figure of 100 million. He also marvelled that pepper had come so much into fashion, since it had nothing to recommend it but a certain pungency, and wondered who first thought to try it as food.

• 5. Routes And Monopolies

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  Vasco da Gama became the first person to reach India by sailing around Africa, arriving in 1498. Asked by Arabs in Calicut, who spoke Spanish and Italian, why they had come, his representative replied, "we seek Christians and spices". The exorbitant price of pepper during the Middle Ages, and Venice's monopoly on the trade, had pushed the Portuguese to seek that sea route in the first place. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas helped them gain far greater control of trade on the Arabian Sea.

  For 150 years the Portuguese monopolised the spice trade, and Portuguese became the lingua franca of the then known world. The trade made Portugal rich. Then in the 17th century the Dutch and English seized almost all Portuguese interests in the area, taking advantage of Spanish rule over Portugal during the Iberian Union of 1580 to 1640. The pepper ports of Malabar began trading increasingly with the Dutch between 1661 and 1663.

  Much earlier trade ran east rather than west. Before the 16th century, pepper grew in Java, Sunda, Sumatra, Madagascar, Malaysia, and across Southeast Asia, trading mainly with China or used locally. The Maluku Islands, historically the Spice Islands, produced nutmeg, mace, cloves, and pepper, and their riches sparked European interest in buying directly in the 16th century. As supplies into Europe rose, the price of pepper fell, and a seasoning once reserved for the rich became an everyday item for people of average means. Today pepper accounts for one-fifth of the world's spice trade.

• 6. Pepper In China

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  Black pepper first appears with certainty in Chinese texts in the third century CE, under the name hujiao, or foreign pepper. It did not seem widely known then, and it failed to appear in a fourth-century work cataloguing spices from beyond China's southern border, even though that work listed long pepper. By the 12th century it had become a popular ingredient in the cuisine of the wealthy, sometimes replacing China's native Sichuan pepper, the tongue-numbing dried fruit of an unrelated plant.

  Marco Polo testifies to its popularity in 13th-century China. Relating what he heard of the city of Kinsay, which is Hangzhou, he reports a customs officer of the Great Kaan stating that the pepper introduced daily for consumption there amounted to 43 loads, each load equal to 223 lb. During the Ming treasure voyages of the early 15th century, Admiral Zheng He and his fleets returned with so much black pepper that the once-costly luxury became a common commodity.

  An older claim reaches back to the second century BCE. If poetic reports about an explorer named Tang Meng are correct, pepper may have been known then. 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, told it came from the markets of Shu in present-day Sichuan. Historians traditionally read sauce-betel as a sauce of betel leaves, though some argue it actually meant pepper, either long or black.

• 7. Heat, Aroma, And Sneezes

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  Piperine gives pepper its heat, drawn from both the outer fruit and the seed. Black pepper holds between 4.6 and 9.7 percent piperine by mass, and white pepper slightly more. By weight, refined piperine is about one percent as hot as the capsaicin in chilli peppers, a different kind of spiciness entirely. The outer fruit layer left on black pepper also carries aroma-contributing terpenes: germacrene at 11 percent, limonene at 10, pinene at 10, alpha-phellandrene at 9, and beta-caryophyllene at 7, lending citrusy, woody, and floral notes.

  Rotundone gives pepper its aroma, a sesquiterpene first discovered in the tubers of Cyperus rotundus. It can be detected at concentrations of 0.4 nanograms per litre in water and wine, and also appears in marjoram, oregano, rosemary, basil, thyme, geranium, and some Shiraz wines. White pepper loses most of these scents, since fermentation and processing strip the fruit layer. That processing can also develop off-flavours described as pig manure, horse manure, phenolic, and cheese, from compounds including 3-methylindole and butyric acid.

  Light and air are pepper's enemies. Exposure to light can turn piperine into nearly tasteless isochavicine, and aromatics evaporate quickly once the spice is ground. For that reason most culinary sources recommend grinding whole peppercorns just before use. Spice mills appeared in European kitchens as early as the 14th century, though the mortar and pestle stayed popular for centuries. Pepper is also known to cause sneezing, often blamed on piperine irritating the nostrils, though few if any controlled studies have tested the claim.

• 8. Myths And Shipwrecks

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  More than 2,000 peppercorns were recovered in 2021 from the wreck of the Gribshunden, a Danish-Norwegian flagship that sank in the summer of 1495. Alongside them lay clove, ginger, saffron, and almond. The ship was carrying King Hans to a political summit, and the spices were likely meant for feasts that would have drawn the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish Councils of State. The find is rare archaeological proof of pepper reaching late medieval Northern Europe.

  A persistent myth holds that medieval cooks used pepper to hide the taste of rotten meat. No evidence supports it, and historians view it as highly unlikely. Pepper was a luxury affordable only to the wealthy, who had unspoiled meat, and people of the time knew that spoiled food made them sick. The related belief that pepper served widely as a preservative is also questionable. Piperine has some antimicrobial properties, but at spice concentrations the effect is small, and salt was the far more effective preservative behind common salt-cured meats.

  Pepper carried weight in older European records too. Apicius' cookbook De re coquinaria, a third-century text partly based on a first-century original, includes pepper in most of its recipes. In the 18th century Edward Gibbon called pepper a favorite ingredient of the most expensive Roman cookery. A riddle by Saint Aldhelm, a seventh-century Bishop of Sherborne, hints at the spice's standing in England at that time. Pepper also held a place in medicine: it appears in the Buddhist Samaññaphala Sutta, chapter five, as one of the few medicines a monk is allowed to carry.