a day ago
How the black pepper found its way around the globe
Thousands of years ago in the forests of southern India, humans discovered a fiery berry growing on a vine. The plant was easy to overlook amid the splendour of its tropical surroundings. It bore no large, brightly-coloured blooms, nor did it let off any striking aroma. Yet, when its berries were picked before ripening and left to dry, they turned into wrinkled little grains packed with marvellous flavour and health benefits: black pepper. Soon, pepper was making its way into food and concoctions to cure all kinds of ailments, from tummy troubles to colds, coughs and fevers. Ayurveda, an ancient Indian system of medicine, is full of references to it.
In time, traders took this wondrous spice to foreign lands. From mummification in ancient Egypt to Roman cookbooks, black pepper found its way into cultures all around the world and, by the Middle Ages, it had become one of the world's most sought-after commodities. So prized was pepper that it came to command 10 times the price of any other spice and could be traded for gold and silver in many parts of Europe.
Even though Europe treasured pepper, it grew only in faraway tropical lands and very few Europeans had actually seen a pepper plant growing in the wild. But this didn't stop people from conjuring some truly bizarre ideas about the origins of the valuable spice. One of the most persistent myths came from Bartholomew the Englishman, a teacher and writer (no less!) who lived the 13th century and wrote encyclopaedias. He claimed that pepper grew in forests guarded by serpents and to harvest it, men had to chase away these serpents using fire, which ended up burning the berry and turning it black!
On the move
Such beliefs could only be well and truly extinguished during the 15th and 16th centuries, when ambitious Europeans set sail on the vast ocean and braved countless hazards to directly get to the source of the spice and other such riches from the east. An age of unprecedented global trade had dawned upon the world and pungent pepper led the way.
The Portuguese, who were the first to reach the coast of India and directly import pepper into Europe, reaped staggering profits from this trade. Meanwhile, bringing down the cost of pepper for English consumers was one of the major reasons behind the establishment of the East India Company that eventually conquered India and made it part of the enormous British Empire.
Gradually, the spice that had been considered rare and precious for most of human history, particularly in the West, became commonplace. By the 18th century, the spice trade itself had been eclipsed by other luxuries that had caught the European imagination.
