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Sunday, June 22, 2008 - 7:37 PM
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, the result of a fungal
reaction. Once dried, the fruits are called black peppercorns.http://louis2j1sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com
White pepper consists of the seed only, with the fruit removed. This
is usually accomplished by allowing fully ripe berries to soak in water
for about a week, during which the flesh of the fruit softens and decomposes.
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.http://louis2j1sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com
In the U.S., white pepper is often used in dishes like light-colored sauces or mashed potatoes,
where ground black pepper would visibly stand out. There is
disagreement regarding which is generally spicier. They do have
differing flavors due to the presence of certain compounds in the outer
fruit layer of the berry that are not found in the seed.
Black, green, pink, and white peppercorns
An example of ground black pepper
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 sulfur 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 cuisines, particularly Thai cuisine.[5] Their flavor has been described as piquant and fresh, with a bright aroma.[6] They decay quickly if not dried or preserved.
A rarely seen product called pink pepper or red pepper consists of
ripe red pepper berries preserved in brine and vinegar. Even more
rarely seen, ripe red peppercorns can also be dried using the same
colour-preserving techniques used to produce green pepper.[7] Pink pepper from Piper nigrum is distinct from the more-common dried "pink peppercorns", which are the fruits of a plant from a different family, the Peruvian pepper tree, Schinus molle, and its relative the Brazilian pepper tree, Schinus terebinthifolius. http://louis2j1sheehan2esquire.blogspot.comIn years past there was debate as to the health safety of pink peppercorns, which is mostly no longer an issue.[8] Sichuan peppercorn is another "pepper" that is botanically unrelated to black pepper.
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 a higher-grade pepper, made from the largest,
ripest 10% of berries from Malabar plants grown on Mount Tellicherry.[9] 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.[10]
Piper nigrum from an 1832 print
The pepper plant is a perennial woody vine growing to four metres in height 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 centimeters as
the fruit matures.
Black pepper is grown in soil that is neither too dry nor susceptible to flooding,
moist, well-drained and rich in organic matter. 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 and spread out to dry in the sun, then the
peppercorns are stripped off the spikes.
[edit] History
Pepper has been used as a spice in India since prehistoric times. Pepper is native to India and has been known to Indian cooking since at least 2000 BCE.[11] J. Innes Miller notes that while pepper was grown in southern Thailand and in Malaysia, its most important source was India, particularly the Malabar Coast, in what is now the state of Kerala.[12] Peppercorns were a much prized trade good, often referred to as "black gold" and used as a form of commodity money. The term "peppercorn rent" still exists today.
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.[13]
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.
Black pepper, along with other spices from India and lands farther
east, changed the course of world history. It was in some part the
preciousness of these spices that led to the European efforts to find a
sea route to India and consequently to the European colonial occupation
of that country, as well as the European discovery and colonization of
the Americas.
[edit] Ancient times
Black peppercorns were found lodged in the nostrils of Ramesses II, placed there as part of the mummification rituals shortly after his death in 1213 BCE. Little else is known about the use of pepper in ancient Egypt, nor how it reached the Nile from India.
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.
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 less popular at the time.
A possible trade route from Italy to south-west India
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 southern India's Malabar Coast was near routine. Details of this trading across the Indian Ocean have been 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, from where the cargo was carried overland or via the Nile Canal 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? (N.H. 12.14)[14]
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".
[edit] 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 and Attila the Hun each demanded from Rome
a ransom of more than a ton of pepper when they besieged the city in
5th century. After the fall of Rome, others took over the middle legs
of the spice trade, first the Persians and then the Arabs; Innes Miller cites the account of Cosmas Indicopleustes, who travelled east to India, as proof that "pepper was still being exported from India in the sixth century".[15] 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.[16]
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.[17]
In addition, people of the time certainly knew that eating spoiled food
would make them sick. 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.[18] Salt is a much more effective preservative, and salt-cured meats
were common fare, especially in winter. However, pepper and other
spices probably did play a role in improving the taste of
long-preserved meats.
A depiction of Calicut, India published in 1572 during Portugal's control of the pepper trade
Its exorbitant price during the Middle Ages — and the monopoly on
the trade held by Italy — was one of the inducements which led the Portuguese to seek a sea route to India. In 1498, Vasco da Gama became the first European to reach India by sea; asked by Arabs in Calicut (who spoke Spanish and Italian) why they had come, his representative replied, "we seek Christians and spices." Though this first trip to India by way of the southern tip of Africa
was only a modest success, the Portuguese quickly returned in greater
numbers and used their superior naval firepower to eventually gain
complete control of trade on the Arabian sea. It was given additional
legitimacy (at least from a European perspective) by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which granted Portugal exclusive rights to the half of the world where black pepper originated.
The Portuguese proved unable to maintain their stranglehold on the
spice trade for long. 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 and the English. The pepper ports of Malabar fell to the Dutch in the period 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 of more average means. Today, pepper accounts for
one-fifth of the world's spice trade.[19]
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.[20]
In the 3rd century CE, black pepper made its first definite 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.[21]
By the 12th century, however, black pepper had become a popular
ingredient in the cuisine of the wealthy 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."[22]
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.
[edit] Pepper as a medicine
' There's certainly too much pepper in that soup!' Alice said to herself, as well as she could for sneezing. — Alice in Wonderland (1865). Chapter VI: Pig and Pepper. Note the cook's pepper mill.
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.
Black peppercorns figure in remedies in Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani medicine in India. The 5th century Syriac Book of Medicines prescribes pepper (or perhaps long pepper) for such illnesses as constipation, diarrhea, earache, gangrene, heart disease, hernia, hoarseness, indigestion, insect bites, insomnia, joint pain, liver problems, lung disease, oral abscesses, sunburn, tooth decay, and toothaches.[23]
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.[24]
Pepper has long been believed to cause sneezing; this is still believed true today. Some sources say that piperine, a substance present in black pepper, irritates the nostrils, causing the sneezing;[25]
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.
Pepper is eliminated from the diet of patients having abdominal
surgery and ulcers because of its irritating effect upon the
intestines, being replaced by what is referred to as a bland diet.
Pepper contains small amounts of safrole, a mildly carcinogenic compound.
It has been shown that piperine can dramatically increase absorption of selenium, vitamin B and beta-carotene as well as other nutrients.
[edit] 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, milligram-for-milligram, is about one percent 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.[26]
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.[27]
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.[28]
Peppercorns are, by monetary value, the most widely traded spice in
the world, accounting for 20 percent 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 percent of all spice
imports in 1998.[29] By weight, slightly more chilli peppers are traded worldwide than peppercorns. The International Pepper Exchange is located in Kochi, India.
Vietnam has recently become the world's largest producer and exporter of pepper (82,000 long tons in 2003). Other major producers include 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.[30]
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