Put some Pep in your Step

n          Unlike salt, pepper is not essential for life, but the twonhave been inextricably linked for millennia. Pepper was well known to thenRomans, (to them, it was piper), and was so popular that Pliny the Elderncomplained that: – “… in no year does India drain our empire of less than fivenhundred and fifty millions of sesterces, giving back her own waresnin exchange, which are sold among us at fully one hundred times their primencost.” (Pliny, Natural History, Book VI, Ch. 26). In contemporary terms, thatnis £1,400,000 per annum; today, pepper still accounts for over 20% of thenworldwide spice trade. 

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nBlack pepper is produced from the unripe green seeds of thenpepper tree. The seeds are briefly boiled in water and then left to dry. To makenWhite pepper, the ripe red seeds are boiled in water and then left to soak fornabout a week (a process called retting), before rubbing to remove the flesh.nThese are then dried and ground later.

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nOne of earliest cookery books is Apicius (De re coquinaria)n(“On Cookery”), which includes pepper in 349 of its 468 recipes. Apicius is ancollection of ten separate recipe books, (not, as some think, written by thennotorious Roman gourmand Marcus Gavius Apicius), compiled in about the 4^thnCentury CE, and includes such gems as this: –

nFor Flamingo

nScald the flamingo, wash and dress it, put it in a pot, addnwater, salt, dill, and a little vinegar, to be parboiled. Finish cooking with anbunch of leeks and coriander, and add some reduced must to give it colour. Innthe mortar crush pepper, cumin, coriander, laser root, mint, rue, moisten withnvinegar, add dates, and the fond of the braised bird, thicken, strain, covernthe bird with the sauce and serve. Parrot is prepared in the same manner.

n Apicius Bk. VI, 231.

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nAfter Rome fell, pepper continued to be traded from thenMalabar coast of India, via Arab traders into Italy, the city states of whichnhad a virtual monopoly on it. In a bid to break this monopoly, other Europeannnations sought a sea-route to the East, in particular the English, the Dutchnand the Portuguese. Such were the vast quantities that were bought from them,nthe people of the Spice Islands believed that the houses of the English must benso cold that in order to make them warm, they plastered the walls with crushednpepper. The marvelous story of the Spice trade, and the wars it caused, isntold in the wonderful book Nathaniel’s Nutmeg by Giles Milton, a book I cannotnrecommend too highly.

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nIn a letter to Cuthwin, the monk Cuthbert wrote that whennthe Venerable Bede (remember him) was on his deathbed, he said to him “I have certain things of value in myncasket, that is some pepper, napkins and incense; but run quickly and bring thenpriests of our monastery unto me hither, that I also may distribute to them thenlittle gifts such as God hath granted me.” This indicates how valuable peppernwas regarded at the time.

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nA common fallacy is that, in the past, people would usenspices to disguise the taste of rotten meat. Spices were phenomenally expensivenin the past, and people may well have over-used them in a display ofnconspicuous consumption and to impress their fellows, but the same people whoncould afford to buy the spices could certainly afford top-quality meat too. Andnour ancestors were not stupid – they knew fine well that eating rotten foodnwould make them ill. Further to which, there were stringent regulations in thenpast regarding the quality of food – in 1319, for example, one William Sperlynnwas sentenced to the pillory for selling two bad carcasses of beef.

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nMulligatawny soup gets its name from the Tamil milagu tannin– ‘pepper water’. Eliza Acton gives a recipe for Mullagatawny [sic] Soup in the ModernnCookery for Private Families. This book, published in 1845, was the firstncookery book aimed at the domestic cook (rather than the professional). It was alsonthe first to include lists of ingredients and suggested cooking times, (and thenfirst recorded recipe for Brussels Sprouts!). Later writers, including MrsnBeeton, used Acton’s book as a model for their own works.

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nTomorrow – mustard.

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