Ingredients · Spice

Black Pepper

Piper nigrum · Piperaceae (pepper family)

Black Pepper
The dried unripe berry of a climbing vine — the mill on every table, and the most travelled object in any kitchen. Black, white and green pepper are all the same berry, picked at different moments and treated differently: black is picked unripe and dried in the sun until the skin blackens; white is ripe, soaked about a week until the flesh loosens, then rubbed clean; green is unripe and preserved before it can darken. Pink and Szechuan peppercorns only look like pepper — they come from unrelated plants. Forty-one products here carry black pepper, which is about as close to universal as an ingredient gets.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partBerry
KindSpice
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromIndia (native range)
TasteWarm, woody, resinous and sharp; the bite is piperine, roughly a hundredth as potent as capsaicin

How to use it

Grind it fresh when you can; pre-ground pepper loses its aromatics fast, keeping the heat and losing the perfume. Coarse for steak, a crust or a cheese board; fine for sauces and eggs. Add it near the end of a long braise rather than the start. White pepper where you want the heat without the black flecks — béchamel, mashed potato, hot-and-sour soup, and much of Chinese, Thai and Portuguese cooking.

With food

Beef and every kind of egg. Butter, cream and cheese. Strawberries. Tomato. Cured pork. Lemon. Fresh cheese with honey. Cabbage and root vegetables.

With spices

Salt, first and always. Coriander and cumin. Garlic and onion. Bay and thyme for a braise. Cardamom, cloves and cinnamon in garam masala and masala chai. Lemon peel, for lemon pepper.

With tea

Masala chai, where it is one of the working spices. Assam, which has the malt to meet it. A peppercorn or two in a pot of pu-erh.

Its story

Where it comes from

Native to South Asia; wild pepper grows in the Western Ghats behind India's Malabar Coast. Vietnam is now the largest producer at roughly 30% of world output, then Brazil, Indonesia and India. White pepper is associated with Bangka Island in Indonesia and with Sarawak. Shop notes name no origin country for our lots — Tellicherry, Malabar and Vietnam are all trade names worth asking the supplier about.

What happened

Black peppercorns were found in the nostrils of Ramesses II, who died in 1213 BCE — South Asian fruit, in an Egyptian tomb. A Sangam poem describes Greek-speaking ships at the port of Muziris arriving with gold and leaving with pepper, and a second-century papyrus now in Vienna records the cargo of one of those ships, the Hermapollon, carried from India to the Red Sea, across the desert to Koptos, down the Nile to Alexandria: six parcels worth just short of 1,155 talents. Pliny complained that India drained the empire of fifty million sesterces a year. When the Goths besieged Rome in 408, three thousand pounds of pepper were part of the ransom that lifted the siege. Asked at Calicut in 1498 why the Portuguese had come, Vasco da Gama's man said they sought Christians and spices; on the next voyage da Gama bombarded the city for the better part of two days. London's pepperers were organised by 1180 and became the Grocers. Salem, Massachusetts ran pepper ships to Sumatra from 1797 — and when one was attacked at Kuala Batee in 1831, the United States sent a frigate that stormed the forts and burned the town.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

Every ingredient in the shop

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