Posted By admin on July 15, 2010

Rare Ancient Roman

Why do you suppose pepper became everyone's spice of choice, rather than, say,...?

...nutmeg, mace or cloves?
You almost invariably see salt paired with pepper at restaurants. Pepper has become ubiquitous. But once upon a time and for a period of at least three thousand years, pepper was one of a number of spices prized as luxuries, by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, and later by the Europeans. Nutmeg and mace were both rarer and more difficult to obtain. The Elizabethans waxed mystical about the supposed ability of nutmeg to ward off the plague. The British and the Dutch fought like cats and dogs in the seventeenth century over Run Island, at the time the sole source of nutmeg and one of the few sources of mace.

Spices have fueled economies and been a cause for wars. They've been credited with every conceivable property from the medicinal to the magical to the sexual. So why, in all that tumultuous and fascinating history, did pepper win the ascendancy? Why do we pair pepper with salt?

The pairing of salt and pepper is actually relatively recent. Salt has been a mandatory table condiment forever, but pepper was restricted to the kitchen until the mid 19th century.

Pepper shakers really took off in the mid 20th century in America. (This I learned while visiting the Salt and Pepper Museum. Yes, there’s a Salt and Pepper Museum.) People wanted a bit more flavor in their food, but quickly became a rather sad pile of black dust to be dumped on things.

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, recipes tended to just dump the whole spice rack in there. A 13th century for chicken soup:

Cook them in wine and water, dismember them, and fry them in lard. Crush almonds with some capon livers and dark meat, steep in your broth, and put to boil on your meat. Take ginger, cloves, galingale, long pepper and grains of paradise, and steep in vinegar. Boil well together, and thread in well beaten egg yolks. It should be well thickened.

(That "long pepper" is a different plant from the Piper nigrum we use today, but they have a similar flavor.)

This was for high-end cooking, though. More ordinary cooks couldn’t dump in so many spices, though they still liked to when they could. Amelia Simmons’ 1796 cookbook calls for:

One pound neats’ tongue, one pound apple, one third of a pound of sugar, one quarter of a pound of butter, one pint of wine, one pound of raisins, or currants, (or half of each) half ounce cinnamon and mace.

This calls for sweetness and a lot of what we think of as "sweet" spices. What happened over time is that cooks lost their taste for sweet spices in savory dishes. The next most popular seasoning (not technically a spice) is garlic, also a sharp spice. But even in 1918, Fannie Farmer had this to say about soupmaking:

Spices, including whole cloves, allspice berries, peppercorns, and stick cinnamon, should be kept on hand. These seasonings, with the addition of salt, pepper, and parsley, are the essential flavorings for stock soups.

Few people would put cloves, allspice, and cinnamon in their chicken soup today (though a subtle hint of them makes an intriguing addition to beef soup). Note that Farmer has begun to distinguish between "peppercorns" and "pepper", by which she meant pre-ground pepper, which has much less flavor.

Why did the "sweet" spices fall out of favor, and pepper remained? I suspect it’s because pepper has more "bite" and therefore doesn’t go well in sweet dishes. Few people would eat a pepper ice cream, or a garlic ice cream, though recipes for both can be found.

Chiles would also go well; we could just as easily have had a chile shaker. I think that chiles were too much for the increasingly bland tastes of the American public in the early 20th century. Pepper, especially the black dust that comes out of most pepper shakers, was as adventurous as people were willing to go.

It's hard to say why pepper shakers became the rage, along with salt shakers. It bears a strong resemblance to a fad; designers liked the look of it. It fit easily into the notions of "elegance" in mid-20th century America. The pair make a nice design element.

Freshly-ground pepper has come back into vogue. (As has freshly-ground salt, which is something of an oddity, because salt, unlike pepper, doesn’t go stale when ground.)

You still won’t find salt and pepper shakers in most French restaurants; seasoning is to be done by the cook, and fiddling with it yourself is gauche. Pepper is one of the few true spices they use; their cooking is based largely on herbs instead. That is, leaves rather than seeds. Leaves have more subtle flavors, and are native to the regional cuisine.

Category: Antiques
Tags: ancient, books, coins, history, roman