Black pepper from India's Malabar coast was the most traded spice in history. Its story runs from Egyptian mummies and Roman warehouses to Portuguese fleets, Salem merchants and Vietnamese farms.
Overview¶
Black pepper, the dried fruit of the vine Piper nigrum, is native to the Western Ghats of south-west India. For more than two thousand years it was the backbone of the spice trade, traded in larger volumes than any other spice, and it remains the world's most traded spice today. Its history is unusual in that it went from a luxury to a table staple without ever falling out of use.
Timeline¶
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| c. 1213 BC | Peppercorns placed in the nostrils of Ramesses II's mummy |
| 4th century BC | Theophrastus describes two kinds of pepper, probably black and long |
| 1st century AD | Muziris on the Malabar coast is the chief pepper port for Roman ships |
| AD 77 | Pliny records long pepper at 15 denarii a pound, white 7, black 4 |
| AD 92 | Horrea piperataria (pepper warehouses) built in Rome under Domitian |
| AD 408 | 3,000 lb of pepper included in Alaric's ransom of Rome |
| 1180 | A Guild of Pepperers recorded in London |
| 1498 | Vasco da Gama reaches Calicut, the Malabar pepper market |
| 1663 | The VOC takes Cochin from the Portuguese |
| 1790s–1840s | Salem, Massachusetts, dominates American pepper imports from Sumatra |
| 2000s | Vietnam becomes the world's largest producer |
Antiquity¶
Pepper reached Egypt early, but its great era began with Rome. After the monsoon route to India opened, pepper became common enough in Rome to appear in most recipes in the Apicius collection. Pliny the Elder was puzzled by its popularity: it had, he wrote, neither fruit nor berry to recommend it, only its pungency, yet people bought it by weight like gold and silver. Interestingly, long pepper was then the more expensive kind. See ancient spice routes and spices in the ancient world.
The Middle Ages¶
Pepper remained the bulk spice of medieval Europe, arriving via Alexandria and Venice. It was valuable enough to serve as a store of wealth and a means of payment: rents, dowries and taxes were sometimes paid in pepper. The English legal term peppercorn rent, now meaning a nominal payment, comes from this practice, though by later centuries a single peppercorn was a token. London's Pepperers, recorded in 1180, were among the ancestors of the Grocers' Company, chartered in 1428. The word "grocer" originally meant a wholesale dealer, one who sold en gros.
Pepper was, if anything, a little less fashionable in elite medieval cookery than ginger and cinnamon, precisely because it was more common. See medieval spice cookery.
The age of sail¶
The Portuguese sailed to India largely for pepper. Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in 1498, and for most of the 16th century the Portuguese crown tried, and failed, to monopolise the Malabar pepper trade. Plenty continued to flow through the Red Sea to Venice. In the 17th century the Dutch and English companies shifted much of their buying to Sumatra, Java and Banten, where pepper had been planted on a large scale. See the Portuguese sea route and the Dutch East India Company.
Pepper's price in Europe fell steadily as supply grew. By the 18th century it was an ordinary grocery, and the great profits had moved to tea, textiles and sugar.
An American chapter¶
From the 1790s, merchants from Salem, Massachusetts, sailed directly to the west coast of Sumatra for pepper, and for several decades Salem handled most of the United States' pepper trade, re-exporting much of it to Europe. The trade was marked by violent incidents on both sides, including a US naval bombardment of Kuala Batee in 1832 after the plundering of the Salem ship Friendship.
Black, white, green and long¶
The same fruit gives black pepper (picked unripe and dried), white pepper (ripe fruit soaked and skinned), and green pepper (unripe, preserved in brine or freeze-dried). Long pepper (Piper longum) is a different species, whose importance faded after the chilli arrived from the Americas: in India and elsewhere chillies took over the role of heat that long pepper had filled. Cubeb and grains of paradise, also sold as "peppers" in medieval Europe, followed a similar decline. The word pepper itself traces back through Latin and Greek to Sanskrit pippali, which meant long pepper; see etymology of spice names.
📌 Why pepper and salt?
The pairing of salt and pepper as the standard table condiments is usually traced to French cookery of the 17th and 18th centuries, when refined cookery dropped most other spices but kept pepper. It spread, the usual account goes, with French culinary prestige; the exact origin is hard to pin down.
Pepper today¶
Vietnam is now by far the largest producer and exporter, followed by countries including Brazil, Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka; see biggest spice producers. Kerala still grows prized Malabar and Tellicherry grades. The chemistry of its bite is covered in piperine.