To All,
In this e-mail "pepper" refers to the black specks that you shake out of a container and also to the plant that produces this spice. "Chili pepper" and "bell pepper" refer to unrelated New World plants.
This is the second in a series of six e-mails on spices. Before reading this e-mail, I recommend that you read the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015, which provides useful background.
The Geographic Background
For reference, the map of India from the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015 is reproduced below. Originally pepper was grown in Kerala on the mountain slopes of the Western Ghats, which run down the southwestern edge of India all the way to its southern tip, and shipped from ports such as Calicut and Cochin. Goa was the Portuguese enclave that was the headquarters of Portuguese operations in India and the East Indies.
The Pepper Plant
The pepper vine Piper nigrum in the family Piperaceae, the pepper family, grows only in the tropics since it cannot survive frost. It can grow to a height of about 13 feet and requires a tree, trellis, or some other structure to provide both support and shade; excessive sun can scorch the pepper plant [Devasahayam, p. 6]. The pepper vine grows well on jackfruit trees [Shaffer, p. 9]. It grows by twining rather than using tendrils (e-mail of 22 May 2015). The plant grows from sea level up to an altitude of 1500 meters. It can tolerate temperatures between 10 and 40 degrees C., where the ideal temperature is 23-32 degrees C with an average of 28 degrees [Devasahayam, p. 1]. The current modes in which pepper typically is now grown in India is described in Devasahayam [p. 1]:
The black pepper growing tracts in the West Coast of India include (1) coastal areas where black pepper is grown in homesteads (2) midlands and where black pepper is extensively cultivated on a plantation scale and (3) hills at an elevation of 800-1500 m above sea level, where the crop is mostly grown on shade trees in coffee, cardamom and tea plantations.
The first two pictures below show a pepper plantation where the pepper vines are growing thick on the supporting trees; in the second picture, tea is the understory of a plantation in south India. The last two illustrations show close-ups of the pepper vine in a photo and a drawing
Pepper flowers, which grow in an spike usually 4 to 8 centimeters long, are unprepossessing and of interest only because they lead to the fruit. Each spike contains between 50 and 150 flowers. Male and female flowers are separate but in cultivated plants found on the same spike [Devasahayam, p. 1], and the flowers are predominantly self-pollinated, though cross-pollinating is possible. Pepper is one of the rare plants for which the main agent of pollination is gravity; wind aids pollination by jostling the flower clusters and dislodging pollen [Krishnamoorthy and Parthasarathy, p. 40]. One grower/poet describes pollination by saying that "...the bisexual pepper flowers, the color of clotted cream, are pollinated by early morning mist, the dewdrops condensing on the flowers and dripping from tiny blossom to blossom" [Krondl, p. 74]. Here are pictures of pepper flowers.
- Immature flower spike.
- Somewhat more mature flower spike.
- Mature flower spike.
- Close-up of a mature flower spike, with the head of a pin showing the size of an individual flower.
- Close-up of a comparison of a mature flower spike and the immature fruit that develops from a spike.
- An insect pollinating Piper arboreum, a close relative of pepper. Cross-pollination by insects sometimes occurs even though the plant does not count on it.
The fruit grows in an elongated green spike that is from 7 to 15 cm in length. The fruit is usually mature 7-8 months after flowering [Devasahayam, p. 16]. In Kerala the pepper usually ripens in January [Krondl, p. 74]. The last picture shows how the fruit begins ripening at the base (i.e., the stem end) of the spike. Each individual fruit is about 5 millimeters in diameter, and each fruit contains a single seed. (For pictures of seeds, see the pictures below of white peppercorns.)
The life cycle of pepper depends on where it is grown and on what authority you consult, but a typical life cycle is [Nelson and Cannon-Eger, p. 11]:
- A cultivated pepper plant typically starts life as a cutting, which is selected from a desirable cultivar; for the methods used to propagate by cuttings, see Devasahayam [pp. 3-5].
- The vine will grow for the first couple of years and start bearing fruit in its third year [Devasahayam, p. 14].
- Maximum production is reached in the seventh year.
- After fifteen years the pepper plant is senescent and needs to be replaced.
Pepper is native to the southern part of the west coast of India. This is the location of the current state of Kerala, which was the pepper basket of the world until humans spread the plant, which can easily be grown in many areas. The e-mail of 9 Oct 2015 described how the annual pattern of the monsoon governed navigation in the Arabian Sea; the same pattern determines the pepper cycle in Malabar:
Like practically every other aspect of life in Malabar, pepper's cycle of harvest and trade moves to the seasonal rhythms of the monsoon. (The word derives from the Arabic mawsim, "season.") In late May or early June, the rains sweep in on a front of gusty southwesterlies from the Arabian Sea; the "burst." Over the next few months, the first blooms appear on the pepper vines as the upper slopes of the Ghats are drenched in a daily, Wagnerian deluge of inky clouds and crashing thunderstorms. By September, the rain falls less heavily, and the clouds and mists boil away up the valleys and gorges. A long, sultry heat descends on the hills. In November, the winds flip 180 degrees, blowing mild and dry out of the northeast as the hot air of the Central Asian summer is sucked southwards, down the subcontinent from the Himalayas, across the Indian plan to the ocean. In this hot, dry atmosphere the pepper berries cluster and swell; their pungent, biting flavor ripens and deepens. By December, they are ready for harvest. [Turner, p. 16]
More than a hundred cultivars of pepper are known [Krishnamoorthy and Parthasarathy, pp. 38, 39].
Etymology: The Sanskrit pippali gave rise to the Greek peperi, which gave rise to the Latin piper, which in turn gave rise to the words used in the various European languages, e.g., French poivre and German Pfeffer. (Strange to say, the Sanskrit word for black pepper is maricha; not pippali which is the word for long pepper, which is in the same genus as black pepper but a different species.)
History of Pepper
Pepper has been grown in India and Southeast Asia for much more than 2000 years. In an isolated find, black peppercorns were found in the mummy of Rameses II, who died in 1213 B.C. Pepper first became known to the West circa 325 B.C. after Alexander the Great reached India [Turner, p. 61]. Trade was established, but it only became a major flow after the conquest of Egypt in 30 B.C. gave Rome ready access to the Red Sea and as the super-rich in Rome demanded ever more exotic luxuries [Turner, p. 63]. Sailing large and very seaworthy freighters, the Romans established a routine and substantial trade presence in the Arabian sea; while they traded for many goods, their focus was pepper [Turner, p. 61]. For centuries they used the annual pattern of the monsoons to sail back and forth to India, as described in the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015 [Turner, pp. 60, 63-63]. See the picture of the trade route below. With a one-way, as-the-crow-flies distance of more than 5,000 miles, this was the longest trade route of the ancient world [Turner, p. 65].
This trade in black pepper during classical Roman times became so routine and efficient that pepper had by the fourth century A.D. progressed beyond being a luxury and was considered a regular feature on Roman tables [Keay, p. 13, Turner, p. 67]. Pepper was so well-known even to unsophisticated readers that literary sources could take "...familiarity with the spice for granted. A schoolboy's textbook featured a talking pig by the name of M. Grunnius ('Grunter') Corocotta, who obligingly asks to be well cooked with pepper, nuts, and honey" [Turner, p. 67]. One cookbook is known from antiquity; it is attributed to the Roman Apicius from the 2nd century A.D. It pictures pepper being used, much as today, as a universal seasoning; it appears in 349 of the book's 468 recipes [Turner, pp. 69-70].
This pepper came from Kerala in southwest India, where pepper, both wild and cultivated, grew in great abundance. Since Kerala for the most part did not want Roman trade goods, the Romans paid with vast quantities of silver, which caused moralists such as Pliny the Elder (circa 23-79 A.D.) and Seneca (circa 4 B.C. - 65 A.D.) to moan about self-indulgence and the ruinous balance of payments [Keay, pp. 63, 67, 73, Turner, pp. 80-81]. (Recall that we saw in the e-mail of 25 Jul 2015 a parallel situation in the 18th and 19th centuries when Britain imported large amounts of tea from China; since China did not want European trade goods, the British were forced to pay with silver. The British did not like this, and the result was the opium trade and the First Opium War.)
With the fall of Rome and the demise of Roman shipping, well-to-do Europeans still wanted pepper, though at greatly reduced levels [Turner, p. 83], and by the early Middle Ages, use of pepper had become a status symbol. Initially, Arab traders took over the transport across the Arabian Sea [Turner, p. 91], and European knowledge of the source of pepper faded by the 5th century [Turner, pp. 85-86]. When asked where the pepper came from, Arab traders played dumb to protect their monopoly. Just as the Arabs monopolized the flow of pepper from India to the Middle East, by the 10th century Venice (as well as Genoa and other Italian city-states) monopolized the flow of pepper from the Middle East to Europe, and the fortunes of these city states were in large part built on the spice trade [Keay, p. 108]. The high price that resulted from this double monopoly meant that few could afford pepper. (Unless otherwise stated, this paragraph is drawn from this site.)
Pepper is a forgiving, cosmopolitan plant that could readily be grown in many places [Keay, p. 215]:
Easily transplanted given favorable conditions, it obligingly twined itself up any host, whether tree or post, bore berries within a couple of years, and continued to do so for another twelve years.This ready adaptability led to more pepper plantations being established in the Malabar hills, and pepper made its way to Sumatra by the 13th century at the latest and then on to Java [Keay, p. 215, Krondl, p. 75]; some think that pepper was brought from India in the 13th century along with the faith when Islam spread to Sumatra [Keay, p. 132]. though others think that pepper arrived in Sumatra much earlier. Pepper was already found to be a major export from Sumatra in 1411 when a Chinese expedition visited [Keay, p. 132]. By the early 17th century, Sumatra was the largest pepper producer in the world; sometimes even India would import pepper from Sumatra [Shaffer, pp. 76]; moreover, Javan pepper was thought to exceed that in Kerala in quality [Keay, p. 224].
In 1498 Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa and reached India, and this led to founding Portuguese trading posts and establishing trading relationships with the Indians; see the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015. This shifted the spice capital of Europe from Venice to Lisbon. This new route both avoided the double monopoly and also greatly decreased transport costs since the route was all-water; consequently, the availability and price of pepper plummeted. Portugal, as part of its strategy of controlling the spice markets, declared that it had a monopoly of the pepper trade [Krondl, p. 135], but it never achieved this goal since pepper grew so widely. For example, Aceh, at the northwestern tip of Sumatra, remained a free port with a large pepper trade; Arab traders could obtain pepper in Aceh, evade the Portuguese in the vastness of the Indian Ocean, and carry the pepper to the Persian Gulf or even to the Red Sea [Shaffer, pp. 71-72, Krondl, pp. 136, 137].
The importance of pepper to the international spice trade is pointed out by Keay [p. 13]: "In the sixteenth century as much as eighty per cent of all Portuguese spice imports would consist of peppercorns, and in the early seventeenth century Dutch and English shipments would show a like preference." [See Krondl, p. 138n for some detailed figures of one shipment from 1518 for which pepper was 92 percent of the cargo by weight.] Because of its dominance in trade, pepper is often called the king of spices.
Keay [pp. 214-15] describes how in the 16th century pepper lost its mystique as it became more affordable and appeared on European markets in greater quantities, both because of increased planting in India and also because of expansion in Sumatra.
As pepper-pots assumed their place at the centre of even humble tables, piper nigrum [sic] began its fall from grace. Sprinkled on everything from porter to porridge, it lost its air of distinction and became an unexciting domestic staple. By ancient association it would remain a spice, but the term 'spice' would itself thereby be devalued. A commodity of such well-known provenance, unsubtle properties, bulk supply and increasingly affordable price could not longer lay claim to any romance.
The Spice
The spice pepper is made from the fruit. Recall from 25 Jul 2015 that the same tea leaves can be used to make green, white, oolong, or black tea, depending on how the leaves are processed. Similarly, fruit from the same pepper plant can be used to make black, white, green, or red pepper, depending on when the fruit is picked and how it is processed. Here are some general rules.
- The longer one waits to pick the fruit, the more pungent the resulting pepper, though the rate of increase of pungency tails off as the fruit approaches full ripeness.
- A fruit spike will ripen first at the base of the spike, i.e., at the stem end, and ripening then proceeds toward the tip of the spike.
- Piperine, the chemical that gives pepper its bite, it contained in the body of the berry, whereas most of the flavor is in the skin of the berry [Krondl, p. 74].
- The later one picks the fruit, the more expensive the pepper since there is a bigger chance of losing the crop to marauding birds or bad weather.
Black Pepper
To prepare black pepper, pick the fruit when it is just about to ripen; that is, pick it at the first slight sign of pink at the base of the fruit spike. Dip it briefly in boiling water, which not only disinfects it but also ruptures the cell walls and releases enzymes that hasten the darkening process. Finally, dry it for several days, during which time fermentation causes the skin to shrivel and blacken [Turner, xxi]. If one waits too long to pick the fruit, the chemistry of the fruit changes, and it cannot support the enzymatic reactions needed to produce black pepper.
White Pepper
To prepare white pepper, let the fruit ripen fully before picking it. To remove the husk, which is called retting, soak in water for about a week and then rub to remove the husk. This reveals the naked seed, which is the white peppercorn. White pepper is about as pungent as black but lacks complexity in flavor since the outer layer, where most of the flavor components reside, is removed [Krondl, p. 74]. White pepper is more expensive than black not only because it is harvested later but also because more work is done during processing.
Green Pepper
To prepare green pepper, pick the fruit while it is still far from ripe, then either can it,freeze it, or soak it in brine. This causes it to retain the green color. Green pepper is the least pungent of the three main varieties of pepper, and it has a fresher taste.
Red Pepper
To prepare red pepper, pick the ripe, red fruit and process it using the same color-preserving techniques as used with green pepper. Red pepper combines the spiciness of black pepper with the freshness of green pepper. (Do not confuse red pepper in the sense used here with chili pepper, which is from a different plant.)
Concluding Comments on the Spice
Black and white pepper were known in antiquity, but green (developed in Madagascar) and especially red (developed in India) are of recent invention. Here are pictures of the four types of peppercorns.
- All four types mixed together.
- The four types separated, from left to right, green, black, red, and white.
- Three types separated, from left to right, green, white, and black.
If the fruit is soaked in brine, the result is called pickled peppercorns. Here is a picture of picked green and red peppercorns.
Black pepper is the workhorse pepper that is widely used worldwide. White pepper, however, gets considerable use in the West, especially in cases where the color of black pepper would spoil the look of a dish; Indian cooks have no use for white pepper since it lacks complexity [Krondl, p. 74]. Green pepper, though widely used in pepper-producing countries, is little used in the U.S. Red pepper, apparently produced by only a single company in India, is so rare that it is little more than a curiosity.
The spiciness of pepper comes primarily from the compound piperine, which constitutes between 4.6 and 9.7 percent of pepper by weight. By weight, piperine is about one percent as hot as capsaicin, the active ingredient in chili peppers. Pepper is not related to chili peppers or bell peppers, which are in the nightshade family along with the potato and tomato. Chili peppers have surpassed black pepper in general use throughout the world since chilis are more pungent and easier to grow.
Store your pepper in an airtight container since both flavor and aroma can evaporate. Few spices deteriorate as quickly as pepper once ground, since the aromatics dissipate, so the connoisseur will always use just-in-time grinding when using pepper. Also, pepper quickly loses its flavor if exposed to light. If not ground, not exposed to air or light, and kept dry, peppercorns can be stored without significant deterioration for as much as a decade [Krondl, pp. 49, 75]. This lengthy shelf life distinguishes pepper from the other spices to be covered in these e-mails [Krondl, p. 77].
The pepper in a shaker is probably a mixture of pepper from different sources; the vendors try to maintain a balance between cost and taste. This is reminiscent of the blends we have encountered in chocolate (16 May 2015) and coffee (18 Jul 2015).
Medical Use of Pepper
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Extensive use has for centuries been made of spices for medicines. For the most part I ignore this topic is this series of e-mails, except for this section, which illustrates why I am ignoring it. A fifth century medical treatise, the Syriac Book of Medicine, discusses the medical uses of spices. Consider this book's claims for the single spice of pepper, as summarized by Turner [p. 160].
Pepper alone is prescribed for a bewildering array of illnesses: to be poured into the ears for ear ache and paralysis; for sore joints and excretory organs; for abscesses of the mouth and pustules in the throat; for general debility, blackening, and nubbing of the teeth; for cancer of the mouth, toothache, gangrene, and stinking secretions; for a lost voice or a frog in the throat; for coughing up pus; for lung diseases; mixed with jackal fat for chest and internal pains; as a soporific; for heart disease and a weak stomach, for constipation and sunburn; for sleeplessness, insect bites, "bad burps," and poor liver, wind, and dysentery; for jaundice, hard spleen, lose bowels, dropsy, hernias, and a general "evil condition." None of these prescriptions, to my knowledge, has been shown to have the slightest basis in medical fact.
Even if these prescriptions were efficacious, it would do us no good since jackal fat is not sold in drugstores or even on Amazon. In fact, I have been unable to find jackal fat anywhere on the Internet, though I was able to find a fat jackal (see below). This list of conditions that were treated with pepper can be lengthened, e.g., bites from poisonous snakes and leprosy [Shaffer, pp. 2-3].
Pepper was not the only spice that was widely used for medical purposes; "...some seven hundred drugs derived from pepper, turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, and other spices were described by a physician named Sushruta the Second in about 500 B.C." [Shaffer, p. 217] In particular, cinnamon was considered to be another panacea, even into the time of Louis XIV [Turner, p. 307].
Putting my preferences aside, for those interested in the traditional healing arts I will report three treatments. For headache, apply a poultice of earthworms and pepper. For epilepsy, take a draught of gladiator's blood. To forestall aging, take a mixture of viper's flesh, cloves, nutmeg, and mace [Turner, pp. 167, 169].
In our credulous age pepper is making a comeback. Shaffer [chapter 9] is a breathless review of current medical interest in piperine, which is a main constituent of pepper. A close reading shows that there are lots of claims and lots of on-going studies, but no actual benefits have yet been proved. It looks like the most promising property of pepper is that it appears to inhibit a liver enzyme that breaks down various medications; therefore, pepper might be able to boost the effectiveness of these medications [Shaffer, pp. 215, 218-19]. Stay tuned to see what the eventual conclusions are.
What has been proved is that piperine is an effective insecticide [Shaffer, pp. 221-22]. Piperine has been shown to be more effective than DEET, which was my staff of life during my backpacking and camping days. In fact, piperine also has the breakthrough property of not being sticky or smelly, which promises a coming golden age of insect repellents.
Miscellany
Pepper is known to cause sneezing, a claim that I have verified many times. It is thought that piperine irritates the nostrils. Science has apparently not bothered to test this hypothesis.
A recent use of black pepper is to combine it with high quality dark chocolate.
Below is a picture of a pepper shaker for power users.
Vietnam is now the world's largest producer of pepper. In 2007 Vietnam was responsible for 33 percent of world production and India for 25 percent; all other countries were well behind [Krishnamoorthy and Parthasarathy, p. 38].
Wikipedia debunks two myths.
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. 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. [Footnotes and links omitted.]
Students of classic horror movies are interested in anything that involves the goddess Kali. "In the temple of Kali in Cranganore in southern India, black pepper is offered to the goddess so that the spice vessels sailing abroad have a safe voyage'" [Turner, p. 261n].
Pepper apparently does not appear in the Bible.
For the puzzlers among you, here is a riddle set by Saint Aldhelm, a 7th century Bishop of Sherborne in Dorset, England:
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.
Elihu Yale was a pepper trader born in Massachusetts who joined the English East India Company in 1671. In 1687 he became the governor of the English establishment in Madras, India. He played a key role in the events of 1685 that led the English to forestall a Dutch pepper monopoly by setting up a base of operations in Benkoolen in Sumatra, where the English stayed for 140 years [Shaffer, p. 108-110]. In 1718 he donated to the Collegiate School in New Haven, Connecticut, some books, a portrait of King George I, and nine bales of goods that were sold for 800 pounds. For this generosity the school was renamed Yale College. Wikipedia quotes American Heritage Magazine, which calls Yale "the most overrated philanthropist" in American history. A much more significant gift was made by Jeremiah Dummer, but the trustees deemed "Dummer College" to be an unsuitable name for an institution of higher learning.
We have seen how in the 18th and 19th centuries opium was an important part of the tea trade since it was one of the few trade goods that the Chinese would accept (25 Jul 2015). This trading of opium for tea was foreshadowed by trading opium for spices. Opium was first traded for pepper along the Malabar coast in 1663, and by 1688 the VOC (Dutch East India company) exported 56,000 pounds of opium from Bengal to the East Indies, where it was widely used in Malaya, Sumatra, and Java [Shaffer, pp. 158-59]. The allure of opium is described by an Englishman who became addicted [quoted in Shaffer, p. 159]:
... it is a difficult matter to leave it, after once experiencing the exquisite harmony, where with it affects every part of the body. On such a tickling in his blood, such a languishing delight in everything he did, that it justly might be termed a pleasure too great for human nature to support.
Heavy users had a short life expectancy, and they knew it but didn't care [Shaffer, p. 159]. Europeans and Americans found that opium provided a staggering profit margin. For example, 3500 pounds sterling could buy enough opium in India to buy 350,000 pounds of pepper in Sumatra that could in Europe be sold for 35,000 pounds sterling, yielding a 900 percent profit on the transaction as a whole [Shaffer, p. 160]. (By the way, spices were another trade good that was eagerly sought by the Chinese.)
Americans in 1795-1797 made their first successful voyage to Sumatra in which they brought back 150,000 pounds of pepper. After making a second voyage, the captain donated a number of souvenirs such as an elephant's tooth and a collection of sea shells to the "cabinet of curiosities" of the Salem East India Marine Society [Shaffer, p. 173]. This was the foundation for Salem's Peabody Essex Museum. which many of us have been to. After Pepe and Maria visited it, they gave me a pamphlet "Hat Etiquette," which I often study.
History Repeats Itself Department: In 1831 an American pepper ship trading in the Sumatran town of Qualah Battoo was seized by pirates and looted. Andrew Jackson, who Mike has compared to Rambo and who is now best known for appearing on the $20 bill, was then president, and upon hearing of this outrage he dispatched a warship to Sumatra. The ship's company attacked the offending town, looted it, burned it, and massacred the inhabitants. When word got back to the U.S., there was spirited debate over the U.S.'s first-ever armed intervention in Southeast Asia and whether the President had the right to wage war without the approval of Congress. [Shaffer, pp. 186-94]
The e-mail of 9 Oct 2015 pointed out that the allure of spices was closely tied up with their expense and their resulting position as a status symbol. Pepper provides a good illustration of this relationship. Thanks to increased production in Malabar and the increasing efficiency of the Venetians, the price of pepper fell throughout the late Middle Ages. In the middle of the 12th century, the price of a pound of pepper was about the same as a week's wages for a laborer. Over the next two hundred years, the price fell by half. This put pepper within the means of the better-off peasantry and bourgeoisie, and pepper transitioned from an unattainable luxury to an expensive necessity. As the price fell,
This loss of cachet by pepper can be traced in its reduced presence in successive editions throughout the 14th century of a cookbook, The Viandier. Over time, new eiditions of this cookbook gradually replace pepper by still expensive spices. In fact, the time interval in which pepper went out of vogue can be correlated with the time that pepper imports into Europe soared. (This paragraph is based on Turner [pp. 138-39].)...pepper's accessibility to the common sort seems to have caused a loss of interest on the part of the nobility. Much as vegetables carried the stigma of commonness in the eyes of a meat-eating nobility, so too pepper gradually lost its air of exclusivity. As the spice became progressively more affordable and less exotic, the nobility turned its nose up at pepper and began to hunt around for more exclusive flavors. [Turner, p. 138]
Last Words on Pepper, the King of Spices
In ancient, medieval, and early modern times pepper was the premier spice that provided the lion's share of both the bulk and the value of trade. For example, it was the prime spice that the Romans traded for, and it constituted about 80 percent of the shipments of the Portuguese and Dutch [Keay, p. 69]. Currently, pepper is still the world's biggest selling spice [Shaffer, p. 226]. Pepper has depended not on exoticism and an air of mystery for its appeal; rather, it has proved to have significant taste benefits that apply to a wide variety of foods and can be cheaply obtained. Pepper is a classic example of substance over style.
Rick
References
Devasahayam, S. et al., Black Pepper, Indian Institute of Spices Research, Kozhikode, Kerala, July 2014. I only had access only to the on-line version at http://www.spices.res.in/pdf/package/pepper.pdf.
Keay, John, The Spice Route A History, University of California Press, 2006. For a description of this book, see the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015.
Krishnamoorthy, B, and V.A. Parthasarathy, "Improvement of Black Pepper," pp. 37-48 in David Hemming, ed., Plant Sciences Review 2010, CABI, 2011. I only had access only to the on-line version at this site.
Krondl, Michael, The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice, Ballantine Books, 2007. For a description of this book, see the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015.
Nelson, Scot C. and K.T. Cannon-Eger, Farm and Forestry Production and Marketing Profile for Black Pepper (Piper Nigrum), in C.R. Elevitch, Speciality Crops for Pacific Island Agroforestry, Permanent Agricultural Resources, Holualoa, Hawaii, http://agroforestry.net/scps, 2011. I only had access only to the on-line version at http://www.agroforestry.net/images/pdfs/Black_pepper_specialty_crop.pdf.
Shaffer, Marjorie, Pepper: A History of the World's Most Influential Spice, Thomas Dunne Books, 2013. It is good to have a book that covers the basics of pepper, but, compared to Turner, this book is simplistic and lacking nuance. The strong point of this book is its extensive quotations from original sources.
Turner, Jack, Spice: The History of a Temptation, Vintage Books, paperback, 2005 (first published in hardback in 2004). For a description of this book, see the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015.
