By Joel Denker
So ordinary today, pepper was once renowned as an exotic and luxurious spice. The “king of spices” was at once exquisite condiment, “drug,” and preservative. Since the pungent berry grew in the mysterious Indies and since few had ever seen the plant, it carried a powerful mystique. Because of its allure, states, ancient and modern, embarked on a feverish quest to capture the spice at its source and then monopolize trade in the commodity. In the battle, trading empires rose and fell.
Pepper is the fruit of a tropical vine with dark green leaves that, in the wild, grasps on to a supporting tree. Its ancient homeland was the steamy rainforests in the Western Ghats, mountains parallel to the Malabar Coast of Southwestern India (near the present state of Kerala). When Peter Mundy, a seventeenth century English writer, spotted a young pepper shoot in an orchard there, he described it “clasping, twyning and fastning it self theron round about as the ivy doth the oake or other trees with us.”
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To learn more about black pepper, see The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, coming in October from Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442248861/The-Carrot-Purple-and-Other-Curious-Stories-of-the-Food-We-Eat.
