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K NOW- HOW
W
e still hear about “peppercorn payment”, but the days
when pepper cost a small fortune are long gone.
It doesn’t have to be literally carted overland for
thousands of miles, nor does it have to spend months
crossing the oceans to get to us. Even though it has been grown in
Africa and South America for some decades now, the biggest growing
areas are still in its native Asia. However, Vietnam has now overtaken
India, where pepper cultivation dates back more than 4,000 years.
The Malabar coast in the south-west of the country is where pepper
has been known and appreciated the longest. It is from there that
knowledge, both of how to grow this most well-known of all exotic
spices and of its effects spread through Sri Lanka and Cambodia to
Malaysia and Indonesia. For hundreds of years, the pepper trade was
one of the most important links between Europe and Asia. It made
merchants rich – and thus the term “peppercorn payment” was coined.
Likewise, it made those who couldn’t afford the sharp-tasting little
fruit get inventive in the search for affordable alternatives.
QUALITY AND QUANTITY
What was once an expensive rarity has become the norm since the
1950s, and is just as much a part of our table settings and spice shelves
as salt. Around 200,000 tonnes of pepper are served on our plates every
AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE,
Vietnam has now overtaken India in terms of the amount
of area given over to the cultivation of pepper.
year – more than any other spice. It offers quality as well as quantity,
in addition to the greyish 08/15 specks from the plastic box, there
is now a wide range of high-quality options with distinct flavour
profiles. “Instead of enormous plantations which have become standard
in Vietnam, they come from small-scale farmers who are very quality
conscious,” reports Ingo Holland, formerly a starred chef and now a
spice miller with his own manufacturing plant in Klingenberg am Main.
The expense may well be compared to the grape harvest: a delicate
product, a lot of manual work and a return that’s easy to understand.
The family of pepper plants is enormous and covers more than a
thousand different types. The fruits of the true pepper, botanically
known as
Piper nigrum,
find their way into our spice mills. Contrary to
many of its relatives which are similar to pepper, true pepper grows on
the shrub. The evergreen climbing plants can climb up trees as much
as ten metres tall. In cultures where they grow around wooden posts,
they don’t grow as high – to three to four metres at most. The pepper
seeds ripen on ears that are roughly ten centimetres in length. As soon
as they turn bright red they are fully ripe, with the ripening process
lasting roughly six months. This is provided that the disease-prone
plants are in an environment which is warm and humid enough, that
they are nourished by a humus-rich soil and that they are maintained
and cared for by trained staff.
Dish
by WMF
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