Black Pepper

Black pepper, grown in Southern India since more than two thousand years, has always been much valued all over the world. After Alexander the Great had warred upon Central Asia, and indeed even reached India (4.th century BC), new trading routes were established that brought, for the very first time, pepper into the West. Within short time, pepper’s growing popularity made it a most important item of commerce. Soon, Arabic traders established a pepper monopoly and transferred the spice via the spice route through the Arab peninsular and Egypt to their European customers, whom they denied any knowledge about the actual origin of pepper. In spite of its astronomical price, pepper has been much used by the Romans (see Silphion on Roman cuisine) and became, in the Early Middle Ages, a status symbol of fine cookery. At this time, the Italian town of Venezia had monopolized trade with the Arabs to the same extent as the Arabs theirs with the Indian producers. Due to this double monopoly, comparatively few cooks in Europe could afford pepper at all; but when Europe’s economical situation stabilized in the 15.th century, increasing demand for pepper led to the Age of Exploration. European sailors then tried to reach India and to obtain the spice directly from the producers, bypassing both the Arab and the Venetian monopolists. At the end of the 15.th century, Portuguese seafarers changed the medieval view of the world: In 1487, Bartholomeu Diaz surrounded the Cape of Good Hope, thereby proving that Africa was not an impregnable obstacle on the Way to the East; only eleven years later, his countryman Vasco da Gama reached India, founded several Portuguese outposts and established permanent trade relations to local rulers. From this moment on, Lisboa, not Venezia, was the spice metropolis of Europe; of course, prices were not reduced but the profit just shifted to another country (100 years later, profits shifted again, this time to Amsterdam). Portugal’s colonies in South and Southeast Asia persisted until the second half of the 20.th century, even after the spice business had been lost to England and the Netherlands. Piper nigrum: Pepper with unripe fruits Pepper with unripe fruits pharm1.pharmazie.uni-greifswald.de In the meantime, the Spaniards also tried their luck in seafaring: Cristoforo Colombo, an Italian who found support for his unconven­tional plans at the Spanish court, discovered what he had not searched for in 1492 and again eleven years later Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the American continent at the Isthmus of Panamá, thereby reaching the Pacific Ocean. Consequently, it was also a Spanish enterprise to explore this new ocean and thereby to circumvent the earth: Fernão de Magalhães, Portuguese by birth, is usually given credit for this task, although he himself did not survive the journey, but was slain in a conflict with natives of the Philippines. After all, Spanish success was poor in Asia (the Philippines remained the only Spanish colony in the East), and although the larger part of America quickly fell under Spanish dominion, Spain could never assume a significant rôle in the spice trade, allspice and vanilla being the only profitable spices from the New World. Pepper production was long confined to a small region in India (Malabar, in the South of India’s West coast). Because of the expensive transport, but even more because of the effective monopoly first of Arabs and Venetians, then of the Portuguese and at last of the British, price remained rather high, and consumers in Europe were sometimes forced to use pepper substitutes. Of these, the Mediterranean chaste tree berries and the two African spices grains of paradise and negro pepper have lost all importance and are rarely traded at all in our days; similarly, the Mediterranean myrtle berries did not meet much approval. In Central Europe, the native water pepper has occasionally been used to substitute pepper in times of economic shortage, but it is not grown and produced any longer. As a side note on history, German cooks resorted to savory during the years of World War II, when import of tropical spices faded. Piper nigrum: Pepper branche with flowers Flowering pepper In centuries past, long pepper, a close relative of black pepper from India, and cubeb pepper from Jawa, have been common in European cooking; today, they have fallen into oblivion in Western countries, but are still much in use in India and Northern Africa, respectively. Sichuan pepper from China and Japan and pink pepper from South America, although still not too common, have become more popular in the last decades in Western cookery; maybe, the same will happen to Tasmanian pepper. Another pungent spice, chiles from Central and South America, was first introduced as a pepper substitute in European cuisine, but has now gained much popularity all over the world, because of its stronger pungency and easy growing. Today, chiles are the prototypical "hot spice", and their production, usage and trade exceed those of real pepper. See also negro pepper for a comparison between several hot and pungent spices.