Ingredients · Spice
Long Pepper
Piper longum · Piperaceae (pepper family)
What it’s like, and how to use it
How to use it
Grate or grind it — the spike is soft enough to break down. In nihari and long-cooked meat stews. In pickles. In a peppercorn blend, where it brings sweetness the round corns do not have. Use it as you would black pepper and expect something rounder.
With food
Beef and lamb, especially braised. Onion. Yogurt. Honey. Dark chocolate. Fig.
With spices
Black pepper, which replaced it. Ginger. Cinnamon. Cardamom. Clove.
With tea
Masala chai. Assam. Pu-erh.
Its story
Where it comes from
A native of India. Still found in Indian and Nepalese vegetable pickles, and in Indonesian and Malaysian cooking, but rare in general trade. Our lot names no origin.
What happened
Among the Greeks and Romans, and right up to the Columbian exchange, long pepper was a common spice — the pepper of the ancient world. Round black pepper began to compete with it in Europe from the twelfth century and had displaced it entirely by the fourteenth, which is one of the quietest disappearances in food history: a spice that everyone knew simply stopped being bought. Pliny added to the confusion by believing dried black pepper and long pepper came from the same plant. It survived where it started: pippali is the main spice of nihari, the meat stew of Lucknow.
