An evergreen vine plant of the family of pepper and neck, a double-leaf plant. It is native to the Malabar coast in southern India. It has a unique spicy taste, is widely produced in India, and Southeast Asia. Its main purpose is spices, so its use is known only for food, but it is also used in perfumes and herbal medicines.
Add pepper.
In the case of general black pepper, like peppers, the fruit is green when it is undercooked, and as it ripens, it turns dark red.
Pepper is considered an essential spice among Western dishes even in modern times. Usually, “seasoning” reminds us of “salt seasoning” and “add soy sauce” in Eastern cultures such as Korea, but in Western cultures, all Western dishes containing salt, regardless of all kinds of planting such as meat, seafood, vegetables, and grains, are essential like a body of pepper.
In the past, it was expensive, but after pepper became widespread and generalized, it is considered one of the basic seasonings in the West to the extent that the idiom Salt and Pepper became famous. In Korea, you can think of it as a location of soy sauce, red pepper powder, soybean paste, and red pepper paste on the table as regular supplies. Any restaurant in the Western region is basically provided on the table so that it can be used to your taste, and even put in combat food and in-flight meals.
Pepper history.
It is a spice that has caused the most history to be written directly or indirectly among the many cooking ingredients present on Earth. Of course, there are many ingredients that have influenced history even a little, but pepper is considered a representative of spices that decorate a paragraph in history. Contrary to public perception, pepper was one of the spices that spread from India, its origin, before the Middle Ages, to Egypt and the Roman Empire. However, the pepper from BC was used more like a medicine than a spice. Typically, it can be assumed that pepper was used as a medicinal ingredient as a peppered grain found around the nostrils of Ramses II’s mummy. In addition, the Latin word “species,” which is the etymology of English Spice, also meant “native products.” It can be seen that spices such as pepper were recognized as something comprehensive produced as local specialties during this period.
The reason why pepper was not established as food was a big problem with prices due to intermediate margins along with a lack of supply. In the era of Alexandros alone, there is a record of paying pepper with precious metals and jewels as tributes between polis and countries, By connecting India with the Western world, where the Macedonian kingdom was half cut off, recipes using pepper came to Europe, opening the way for edible pepper. Nevertheless, the amount of pepper supplied to the Western world was far short, and Augustus’ conquest of Egypt was the opportunity to solve the problem of pepper supply and become a cornerstone of Western culture. Rome was able to trade with India across the Red Sea to trade valuable spices such as pepper, cinnamon, ginger, and cardamon, leaving behind small Asian land merchants who still had severe intermediate margins and interacting with Ethiopia’s Aksum Kingdom.
In other words, it can be said that these days were a spice boom before the Daehanghae period. Horatius, a poet who left the phrase Carpe diem, jumped into the pepper business and enjoyed writing a parable of pepper in his satirical or pine poem (9), and Daeplinius complained in detail that he couldn’t understand the pepper craze of buying pepper and trading gold in arches, which is not currently used for food.
Rome’s advance into the East served as an opportunity for pepper to be deeply rooted in Roman and even European cuisine, and in a book by gourmet Apicius, a 1-2nd century later, he mentioned that pepper was used in nearly 80% of recipes.
Pepper was later mentioned along with important items during the Price Control Decree announced by Diocletian. Diocletian set the upper limit on the price of pepper at 800 denarius per pound. The cost of the workers mobilized for the civil engineering work was set at 50 denarius per day, so the price of pepper could be bought for 2-3 weeks of labor.