Pepper (3 page)

Pepper is a woody climbing vine, and it still grows wild in its original home in the monsoon forests of the Western Ghats, the mountains lying along India's southwest coast, in what is now the state of Kerala. On this coast, the pepper ports of Calicut and Cochin served traders from many faraway empires. At one time, pepper vines were planted by the people here at the onset of the monsoon in June, and nearly every household had pepper plants that trailed on jack, mango, or on any other available tree.

In the botanical world, pepper belongs to a genus of plants with the musical-sounding name
Piper.
This fifelike genus was created in 1753 by Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist whose system for classifying plants is still in use today. He placed seventeen species in the
Piper
genus, and probably appropriated the ancient Greek name for black pepper,
Peperi
, as the basis for the group. The official botanical name for black pepper is the Latin
Piper nigrum
(
nigrum
is the species name). Although
nigrum
means black, white pepper comes from the same plant, a fact that confounded even the most learned observers. The difference depends on when the berries are picked and dried. Black pepper is picked when the berries are still green, while white pepper is picked later, when the berries have turned from green to red. The berries are placed in water to remove their tough outer covering, and are then dried, as Peter Mundy observed.

Pepper isn't a fast-maturing plant. It takes several years for the branching woody vines to mature, and during their growth the vines can reach up to thirty feet. Trees, wooden poles, reinforced concrete poles, and other material are used as supports. The pepper berries are handpicked when they are ready for harvesting, which usually begins some two to three years after planting. Preparing the berries for market involves a lengthy process of drying, cleaning, and sorting. The plant loves the warm, humid, rainy tropics, in a narrow band around the equator. Pepper also requires well-drained soils, and its preferred habitat is forests. Unshaded plants exposed too long to the scorching sun will not yield many berries. The colorful mixes of whole peppercorns seen in many markets today contain green and black peppercorns. Although there are pink peppercorns, the ripest berries, the sweet pink little balls in some peppercorn mixes aren't true peppers but hail from the cashew family of Brazil.

Black pepper has gotten plenty of competition from its siblings during the course of human history. In ancient Rome, Indian long pepper (botanically,
Piper longum
), was preferred. Long pepper, a shrublike plant—as opposed to a vine—displays long, dull, leathery green leaves.
Piper longum
, a native of northeastern India, was nearly twice as expensive as black pepper in Rome. Today, long pepper is rarely found in the West, although it is still used in India. Cubeb pepper, another
Piper
sibling, is called Javanese pepper, and it originated in Indonesia. Cubebs look like black peppercorns, except they have a kind of tail. Some types of gin are infused with cubeb pepper.

Yet another famous member of the pepper family,
Piper betle
, is well known today in Asia, although it is not a spice. Commonly called
paan
in India, betel is chewed like a plug of tobacco or a wad of gum, and the telltale red spittle it produces is easily spotted on the street. Betel chewers prepare the plug by spreading a thin layer of lime on a fresh betel leaf and adding a sliver of areca nut and a mixture of spices. The nuts, spices, and lime are then wrapped in the leaf. The betel sandwich is reported to aid digestion, freshen the breath, and induce euphoria—the principal reason why it is so popular today among young people in Taiwan, India, and other countries. Over the past decade, unfortunately, medical researchers have linked betel chewing to a rising incidence of oral cancer in Asia. The culprit seems to be the areca nut, not the betel.

Betel chewing isn't a modern phenomenon. The Chinese used betel leaf at least as early as the Tang Dynasty, 618 to 906
A.D.
, and the Europeans who made their way to India four hundred years ago often remarked on the practice, which became fashionable among some Europeans living in Asia. By the sixteenth century, betel chewing was widespread in tropical Asia, and it was considered impolite not to offer a guest a chew (and still is considered so today). A book published in Britain in 1779 on the purchasing of drugs and spices in Asia and the East Indies described chewing betel as “universal in India, as well as on the coast of China: it is produced at all entertainments and visits amongst the natives, and even to Europeans, some of whom, especially the Portuguese, have adopted the habit.”

One hundred years earlier, William Dampier, an intrepid English pirate who lived from 1651 to 1715 and was the first Englishman to travel to the Galapagos Islands, vividly described people chewing betel in the East Indies in his book
A New Voyage Round the World.
Like many people, he used betel and areca interchangeably. “The betel nut is cut in four pieces and wraped up (one each in an Arek leaf), which they spread with a soft paste made of lime or Plaifter and then chew it altogether,” he wrote. “Every man in these parts carries his lime box by his side, dipping his finger into it, spreads his Betel and Arek leaf with it. The Arek is a small tree or shrub of a green bark and the leaf is long and broader than a willow.… It is exceedingly juicy and makes much spit.… tastes rough in the mouth and dies the lips red, and makes the teeth black, but it preserves them and cleans the gums.… It is also accounted very wholesome for the stomach, but sometimes causes great giddiness in the head of those that aren't used to chewing it.”

A Frenchman traveling in Java in the seventeenth century described how “everyone knows what the Betel-Leaves and Arequa Nuts are, which all the Natives of this island both Men, Women, and Children chaw incessantly to fortifie their Gums and Stomach, for sometimes they swallow the Juice. This Juice is as red as Blood … when you are not accustom'd to this Drug you find its Taste insupportably sharp, but otherwise it becomes like Tobacoo, and you find it difficult to leave it.”

In the eighteenth century, a Dutch sea captain noted that when ladies go out in Jakarta, they are invariably attended by four or more female slaves, one of whom bears the betel-box. The chewing of betel and areca nuts, which was called
pinang,
was a common pastime, even an “infatuation,” among the ladies. The pinang was often combined with Java tobacco. The chewing, noted the sea captain, “makes their spittle of a crimson colour, and when they have done it long, they get a black border along their lips, their teeth become black and their mouths are very disagreeable, though it is pretended that this use purifies the mouth, and preserves from the toothache.”

And in the nineteenth century, an American seaman in Sumatra noticed that men “wagged” their jaws over betel, the pungent leaf, “longer than the most inveterate tobacco chewer over his plug.”

*   *   *

Other plants masquerade as pepper, but do not belong to the musical
Pipers,
the only true peppers of the world. Melegueta pepper, for instance, is a pretender belonging botanically to an entirely different plant genus called
Afromomum
. Melegueta is native to West Africa, and it was an important spice in Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, until black pepper became more widely available with the opening of the ocean route to Asia at the end of the fifteenth century. Melegueta was known by the melodic name
grains of paradise,
a reflection of the medieval preoccupation with the Garden of Eden that so heavily influenced Europeans' yearning for the East and its spices. The Portuguese considered the African pepper inferior to black pepper, one of the reasons for its decline in popularity. However, melegueta was favored as a spice by the English until the nineteenth century, and it is still used in West African cookery today. It also is a flavoring in akvavit, the liqueur popular among Scandinavians. Grains of paradise look like small black peppercorns and have a strong peppery sweetness.

The pepper genus
Piper
bears no relationship to another famously misnamed plant, chili pepper, which was originally found in the Western Hemisphere. Chilis belong to the genus
Capsicum
and are an essential ingredient in many tempting dishes all over the world. Chilis were exported from the New World to the Old World. These hot peppers, along with vanilla and allspice, are the only spices native to the tropics of the New World, a comparatively barren part of the spice landscape. Vanilla comes from the flower of a South American orchid.

Christopher Columbus was eager to find pepper in the New World, and the natives of the Caribbean told him the berries grew wild on the islands. It turned out the island berries were allspice, not true pepper. But Columbus didn't have a naturalist with him, and he blithely accepted their word that he had found pepper. Allspice berries look like large peppercorns and are the fruit of an evergreen tree, not of a plant. Nevertheless, allspice became known as pimento, a derivation of
pimiento,
the Spanish word for pepper. Perhaps Columbus was aware of his ignorance, but he was a shrewd man. He had been sent to find spices and other treasures, and he didn't want to disappoint his patrons, the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. He readily acknowledged that he could not identify the astounding variety of trees and plants he encountered on the islands, which he thought were part of Asia. “I do not recognize them, for which I feel the greatest sorrow in the world,” Columbus wrote in the log of his first voyage. Afterward, one of Columbus's letters was circulated widely in Europe. In it he gushed over the islands' limitless fertility and the vast amount of spice that could be obtained. He wrote to his patrons that they could acquire “as much as they order to be shipped.”

Obviously, Columbus wanted to promote his discoveries to his patrons, who he hoped would finance more voyages. In reality, the West offers few appetizing spices, while the East presents a smorgasbord. The
Oxford Concise English Dictionary
defines spice as “an aromatic or pungent vegetable substance used to flavour food, e.g. pepper.” The Asian tropics, where you will find pepper, also nurtures other such notable spices as cinnamon, cloves, ginger, cardamom, turmeric, and nutmeg. Cinnamon is a native of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon); ginger and turmeric originate in Southeast Asia; nutmeg (and mace), the two-in-one spice—mace is the bright red, lacy membrane surrounding the nutmeg seed—is from the Banda Islands; the clove is from the Moluccas (modern-day Maluku Islands); pepper and cardamom are from India. Spices are derived mainly from the bark (cinnamon), root (ginger and turmeric), fruit (nutmeg and cardamom), or berry (pepper) of trees or plants, while herbs, which are mostly found in the temperate zones of the world, tend to be from stems or leaves.

If the New World had hosted the variety of spices found in India and Southeast Asia, the history of the world might have taken a different course.

 

Two

The King of Spices

DURING MEDIEVAL TIMES, BLACK PEPPER WAS USED TO PURCHASE LAND AND PAY TAXES. A MAN'S WEALTH WAS JUDGED BY HOW MUCH PEPPER HE HAD IN HIS HOUSEHOLD.

“Pepper is small in quantity and great in virtue.”

—
P
LATO

“The King of Portugal, Lord of Spices, has set … prices just as he pleases, for pepper, which, at any cost, no matter how dear, will not long go unsold to the Germans.”

—
M
UNICIPAL
C
OUNCIL OF
N
UREMBERG, BEGINNING OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

In 408
A.D.
a barbarian army led by Alaric the Goth swept into northern Italy from the Balkans and made its way to Rome, which was ill prepared to deal with the invaders from the east. Alaric immediately laid siege, cutting off the lifelines to the city. With no assistance forthcoming from her neighbors, Rome stood alone against a formidable foe. The barbarian blockade gradually choked the city. Food became scarce and disease rampant. Starving people filled the streets, and soon corpses littered the city's elegant marble temples. Rome had become a morgue. The city was on its knees when Alaric offered the conditions under which he would withdraw his forces. Naturally, the barbarian demanded the riches of the imperial city, its gold and silver, its exquisite silk tunics, and its pepper. He knew that the Romans had great stores of pepper and other spices in special warehouses called
horrea piperataria
that stood in the city's spice quarter. The warehouses were built during the reign of Domitian, early in the first century, and held rare spices that had poured into Rome, some possibly as tribute. In the second century, during the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus, the famous physician Galen had his office in the spice quarter.