PEPPER, CONSIDERED SEPARATELY

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

There is undeniably something troubling about the way we use pepper. Pepper is among the most classical of spices, with a history of trade and culinary use that dates back several thousand years. And this history is laden with vast sums of money, world-spanning trade routes, once great empires and much culinary and cultural theorizing. Pepper is also among the most distinctive of flavors, rarely retreating into the background, sharp, pungent, spicy and characteristic of the tropics (where the proximity to the sun brings forth exuberant aggressive flavors in everything). And yet pepper has now been thoroughly domesticated and normalized, so that we keep it on the table alongside salt (very obviously a basic background flavor), and use it in most of the food we eat. Given that pepper is not native to much of the world and that it has particularly difficult and distinctive flavors, this ubiquity seems unnatural and puzzling. Harold McGee reports that the Greeks used to keep cumin on the table and used it much as we do pepper. This seems strange, and the theoretical problem raised is similar to that precipitated by our use of pepper.

Pepper is used ubiquitously but, unsurprisingly given its intensity, it tends to be used in small quantities. This has lead to it becoming invisible. Recipes that use pepper as a primary note are rare and, correspondingly, are interesting both theoretically and aesthetically. The South Indians have a number of such recipes, probably because South India is part of the ancestral home of pepper. The recipe below is copied from watching my Malayali friend Raghavan cook (the Malabar coast has historically been one of the most important sources of pepper, and pepper has been used there for thousands of years). It is a revelation if you're not used to thinking about pepper as a particular and distinctive spice rather than as a background seasoning.

To my mind, the most interesting aspect of this template is the structural role that pepper plays. Unlike in many Indian recipes, there is little chili here and pepper occupies the same place and seems to perform a similar function to chili. Interestingly, pepper has been used in India for thousands of years before chili made its European-mediated appearance in the Old World. It is tempting to speculate that these recipes give us a glimpse into pre-chili antiquity in South Asia and gesture at the structural role that chili found itself stepping into upon its arrival. It would be fascinating to analyze the role that chili plays in South and South-East Asia and contrast it with older Mexican recipes, though this would require time and money. But, of course, the point is that pepper is not chili, and the differences are striking; at the least, pepper is warmer, woodier and more citrusy.

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