Black Pepper: The Greatest Fruit There Ever Was
Not recommended for use in a fruit salad
Black pepper. The mightiest of spices. Undisputed champion of the spice trade for centuries. Tried and true method of school nurses trying to get a kid to sneeze out a bead that got stuck in their nose during arts and crafts. Black pepper is truly magical, and it’s definitely my favorite fruit.
Capsicum is the scientific name for the fruits that we call peppers. Piper nigrum is the scientific name for the plant that we use to make black pepper. Piper nigrum is not in the capsicum genus, meaning that black pepper is not a pepper but it is in the pepper family, piperaceae. If I were there when they named chili peppers, I would have stopped that from happening. Christopher Columbus, well known for identifying things incorrectly, improperly identified chili peppers as pepper itself when he first came across a chili pepper and thought, “Oh it’s spicy. Yeah it’s pepper, this stuff is pepper guys.” If you ask for pepper at the dinner table you’re probably going to get the spice that comes from the black pepper plant, which again, isn’t a pepper as we call it today. I know that didn’t clear anything up, but just know that I didn’t ask for this to happen.
Piper nigrum, or the black pepper plant is a vine that grows tiny fruits called peppercorns. These fruits are generally dried up and ground into itty-bitty flakes that we then put on top of food to make it taste better. Peppercorns as a spice come in a few different varieties which vary slightly in taste, but can generally all be used to add a pleasant taste sensation to your day. The two most common types are black and white peppercorns, but green and red peppercorns are also produced and used in areas where black pepper plants can grow.
Black pepper is the most common form of the spice, and is made by cooking and drying the unripe drupes, then cracking or grinding them into small flakes or powder. White Pepper on the other hand is the seventh studio album from the experimental rock band Ween released in 2000. Wait, no, wrong thing. White peppercorns are actually just the seed of a ripe black pepper fruit. The fruit, which is red when ripe, is placed in water until the fleshy bits decompose and fall off. The seeds then get any remaining bits of the fruit rubbed off and you’re left with the small white seed. I don’t want to go on a tangent about the misuse of white pepper in this article, but I did here.
So we know that pepper is a particularly spicy spice. But what gives this spicy spice its spiciness? The chemical piperine. Piperine essentially attacks different receptors in your mouth or nose to make you think you’re in pain and triggers different reactions to help your body get it out of you. It can make your mouth water, or cause you to sweat, or the classic, make you sneeze.
Before medical science was actually useful, many people thought that these reactions were a way to promote good health. Modern science has proven that there are some benefits to ingesting pepper, but common sense got rid of some other peculiar uses for pepper. One fun example of pepper being used as medicine is that people used to treat eye problems by putting a lotion made from pepper directly on the eye. If your eye problem was that it wasn’t burning in pain pepper was definitely the way to go, but if it was cataracts or glaucoma then not so much.
Pepper has had a seat at the dinner table next to its friend salt since the 17th century when the noble court of fancypants Louis XIV decided that pepper was the only spice worth using. While they were most definitely wrong, their reasoning was that pepper is the only spice that doesn’t mask the true flavor of a dish, and honestly, I can’t argue with the logic. When used sparingly, pepper doesn’t fight against the taste of something, but just adds a nice warmth to it.
But pepper had been used long before it got invited to the table. Its use has been documented as far back as 2000 BCE and its worth never diminished throughout the historic spice trade. To this day, it’s still the most widely traded spice, accounting for around 4 billion dollars in trade per year on hundreds of thousands of tons of pepper.
One small fruit, about 5 millimeters across, changed the world of food forever. Like all natural resources, we shouldn’t take it for granted. And if you really want to show your appreciation for the greatest spice of all time, stop buying the finely ground stuff and crack it yourself. It’s better that way, you’ll thank me.
