I sometimes look at my spice cabinet in awe, or down at my eggs when I crack pepper over them and think "people used to die for this."
As a side note, its interesting how similar pepper's preparation is to coffee (in the harvesting, husking, drying process)
Same with Cardamom. I still find the lack of Cardamom in the west weird. It is such an incredible spice yet Americans are obsessed with Cinnamon in their sweets.
I'd even go as far as saying this is one of the reasons. From January people are kinda fed up because in Nov/Dev everything tastes like it.
At least in my circle of friends sooner or later someone says "this tastes like Christmas" - which is usally an indicator of Cardamom, unless very much hidden in e.g. Indian food.
Most spices were expensive because distance and perishing. Faster travel and refrigeration fixed that.
Saffron is expensive because takes an insanely large volume of arable land and manual labor to produce. A saffron crocus plant flowers once per year. It produces about four flowers, and each has three tiny threads of saffron. They are harvested by hand.
To produce a pound of saffron requires about 50,000-70,000 flowers and 40 hours of manual labor.
It is very expensive relative to other foods, and certain varieties of Persian saffron are extremely expensive.
It is also extremely inefficiently used by most chefs. They often merely crumble it into the recipe. You can use a small amount of saffron to flavor a large quantity of food simply by grinding it into powder and mixing with a small amount boiling hot water. The resulting mixture is very potent.
Slate columnist Sara Dickerman wrote a critique of pepper as a table spice a few years ago, while acknowledging its historical medicinal qualities, as the OP does:
> Why should this brawny spice be kept on the countertop at all? Why not stash it in the rack with the fennel seed, the mustard seed, and the cinnamon—all the wonderful spices that add life to our food but are by no means all-purpose? I think we’d appreciate pepper's qualities all the more if we used it just for specific dishes, not universally.
I like having pepper in a shaker on the table because it improves every food I add it to. But it hasn’t occurred to me that might just be a weird bias.
Instead of hiding pepper away on the spice rack, why not bring more spices to the table? Get 5 or 6 more salt shakers, fill them with additional spices, put them on the dining table, and try them with different foods. Could be a fun way to learn more about flavors when cooking at home.
If you mean literally a shaker, I'd highly recommend getting a grinder even if it's one of those disposable ones built into the bottle. One of my pet peeves (#FirstWorldProblems I know) is restaurants, especially those at the mid- to high-end, with pepper shakers.
I've been refilling the same McCormick grinder for a decade now. There is no comparison between freshly ground and pre-ground pepper, even if the peppercorns have been sitting around a while.
You should try upgrading to a proper mill. Those McCormick grinders just kind of crush the corns into little pieces, a real grinder can produce a powerfully pungent powder that will really knock your socks off.
A pepper mill is one of those things that you should upgrade first in your kitchen, right up there with your chef's knife.
I have a spice blend that I made for flavoring beans that has kind of become a new staple at the table. It's about half tomato powder, maybe a quarter hot red chile powder, and equal parts cumin, onion powder, garlic powder, and oregano for the balance. I'm thinking about switching some of the chile powder out for chipotle to see how that goes for the next batch.
Two teaspoons in a bowl of beans makes some nice ranch-style beans, but we've been using it in lots of other places as a shake-on spice (eggs are particularly good). It's a pretty decent dry rub for meat on the smoker or grill too.
My wife and I never eat with fewer than six herb/spice jars and/or condiments at our table. Exactly which ones vary from meal to meal, and there is no guarantee that either of us uses a given spice. (I've been on a fines herbes kick lately, and balsamic glaze is a perennial guest.) Black pepper is present less often than not, but it's used deliberately when it is.
We think we're weird, but I would be glad to know we aren't unique. Spices are the spice of life!
> Why not stash it in the rack with the fennel seed, the mustard seed, and the cinnamon
Interestingly, people kept a third shaker with their salt and pepper as late as the mid-1850's. No one is sure what it was commonly used for, but it might have been powdered mustard.
Salt and pepper both enhance the flavor of food without changing the taste or adding additional flavors, in my opinion, which makes both of them maximally versatile and leads to their primacy.
However, I'm curious now if my assessment of black pepper as unflavored is due to just eating so much of it through my life that I don't realize it has a taste.
Black pepper definitely has a taste, like I can taste it on food and I add more when it's needed. Try tasting a steak and then add some pepper and see if you can't literally taste it, or even try it with bread or rice or anything really. Or have I just gone mad?
It may be that the zesty quality of pepper outpaces any taste. I’m curious to put it on something bland now to see if I can taste it, but my original comment was meant to convey that I might be blind to the actual taste of black pepper as a result of its cultural omnipresence.
I personally can’t taste black pepper, although I enjoy the smell. But I once asked my parents about this and they both said they definitely could taste it.
It’s interesting to think about how recent the massive increase in quality and variety of food really is.
Imagine you were the wealthiest person living in New York City in the 19th or even early 20th century. Your diet would be unbelievably bland. Very few ethnic cuisines, very few spices available, and overall food quality was horrendous due to lack of industrialization, sanitation, and processes that hadn’t been invented yet.
And that doesn’t even get into the consequences of the lack of refrigeration and refrigerated logistics. It is a stunning achievement that we can eat raw vegetables year round, with such a high confidence in safety that every contamination incident is national news. The modern salad is a tribute to man’s genius and capital investment.
As stated in the article, the "piperine" compound in pepper has been observed to increase bioavailability of other compounds we eat. It's been studied in the context of curcumin (from turmeric), which is an anti-inflammatory.
Cardamom goes really well with sweet stuff.
I also occasionally add a pod when I make a cup of tea.
Saffron is expensive because takes an insanely large volume of arable land and manual labor to produce. A saffron crocus plant flowers once per year. It produces about four flowers, and each has three tiny threads of saffron. They are harvested by hand.
To produce a pound of saffron requires about 50,000-70,000 flowers and 40 hours of manual labor.
It is also extremely inefficiently used by most chefs. They often merely crumble it into the recipe. You can use a small amount of saffron to flavor a large quantity of food simply by grinding it into powder and mixing with a small amount boiling hot water. The resulting mixture is very potent.
> Why should this brawny spice be kept on the countertop at all? Why not stash it in the rack with the fennel seed, the mustard seed, and the cinnamon—all the wonderful spices that add life to our food but are by no means all-purpose? I think we’d appreciate pepper's qualities all the more if we used it just for specific dishes, not universally.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2012/01/salt_and_pep...
Instead of hiding pepper away on the spice rack, why not bring more spices to the table? Get 5 or 6 more salt shakers, fill them with additional spices, put them on the dining table, and try them with different foods. Could be a fun way to learn more about flavors when cooking at home.
A pepper mill is one of those things that you should upgrade first in your kitchen, right up there with your chef's knife.
Two teaspoons in a bowl of beans makes some nice ranch-style beans, but we've been using it in lots of other places as a shake-on spice (eggs are particularly good). It's a pretty decent dry rub for meat on the smoker or grill too.
We think we're weird, but I would be glad to know we aren't unique. Spices are the spice of life!
Interestingly, people kept a third shaker with their salt and pepper as late as the mid-1850's. No one is sure what it was commonly used for, but it might have been powdered mustard.
1823: https://books.google.com/books?id=02gUAAAAQAAJ&dq=cruet%20st...
1857: https://books.google.com/books?id=IXkEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA255&dq=c...
1893: https://books.google.com/books?id=gRM-AQAAMAAJ&dq=cruet%20sa...
However, I'm curious now if my assessment of black pepper as unflavored is due to just eating so much of it through my life that I don't realize it has a taste.
I don't have a great source for this, but here's a gizmodo article... https://gizmodo.com/how-salt-and-pepper-became-the-yin-and-y...
Imagine you were the wealthiest person living in New York City in the 19th or even early 20th century. Your diet would be unbelievably bland. Very few ethnic cuisines, very few spices available, and overall food quality was horrendous due to lack of industrialization, sanitation, and processes that hadn’t been invented yet.
And that doesn’t even get into the consequences of the lack of refrigeration and refrigerated logistics. It is a stunning achievement that we can eat raw vegetables year round, with such a high confidence in safety that every contamination incident is national news. The modern salad is a tribute to man’s genius and capital investment.