Black pepper extract

Three thousand pounds of pepper

Rome, 408. Alaric, king of the Goths, has the city surrounded.¹

He held the Tiber, and nothing came up from the port. The Romans cut the grain ration to half, then to a third. Famine brought plague, and because the enemy held every road out, the dead could not be carried beyond the walls for burial, so the city itself became their grave. People came close to eating one another.¹

The Senate sent two envoys. Basilius, a Spaniard and a provincial governor, went with Johannes, head of the imperial notaries, because Johannes knew Alaric. They warned him that Rome's people had armed and were ready to fight.¹

"The thickest grass is more easy to cut than the thinnest," Alaric said, and laughed at them long and hard.¹

His price for leaving was all the gold and silver in the city, every household good and every barbarian slave. One envoy asked what that would leave the citizens. Alaric answered, "Their souls."¹

They settled, in the end, on five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds of silver, four thousand silk robes, three thousand scarlet-dyed skins and three thousand pounds of pepper.¹ The city had no treasury to pay from, and a levy on the senators' property fell short, so the Romans stripped the statues of their gods and melted some of the gold and silver ones down. One was Virtus, Courage herself.¹ Two years later Alaric came back and sacked Rome anyway.¹

Gold, silver, silk and scarlet were the treasures of an empire. Pepper sat on the same list, and every grain of it had crossed an ocean. It is the dried fruit of a vine, and in the ancient world it came from one stretch of India's south-west coast.^{2, 3}

A pharaoh's nose

The mummy of Ramesses II arrived at Le Bourget airport, outside Paris, on 26 September 1976, and France received him with the honours due a head of state.⁴

The king who had ruled Egypt for sixty-six years was in a pitiful state. Fungus had spread through the body, its linen and its coffin, and was slowly eating the king away.^{4, 5} About fifty specialists studied him for eight months at the Musée de l'Homme, and before he went home he was sterilised with gamma rays.⁴

X-rays looked inside the king's hooked nose. It was packed with tiny round grains, each about three millimetres across, behind a plug of resin. They were black peppercorns, pushed in by the embalmers to keep the nose from collapsing.⁴

Ramesses died in 1213 BC.⁵ Somehow, more than three thousand years ago, pepper from southern India had found its way to the embalmers of the Nile.^{3, 4}

Gold in, pepper out

By the first century AD the road to the pepper ran to a timetable. Ships left Egypt's Red Sea coast in midsummer, carrying archers because the Indian seas swarmed with pirates. From the mouth of the Red Sea, with the monsoon behind them, they could reach Muziris in forty days, and they sailed for home in December.⁶

The Tamil poets watched the same ships from the other end. In one old love poem a man tells his heart he will not cross the wild country where bears raid the flowering trees, not even for easy riches, and leave his girl in tears. Tucked into the poem is a picture of prosperous Muziris, where "the fine ships the Yavanas brought, churning white foam on the great river of the Cheras, come with gold and go home with pepper."⁷

A Greek merchant's handbook of the same century agrees. Big ships went to those ports "on account of the great quantity and bulk of pepper," and they arrived carrying "a great quantity of coin."² The pepper came down to the coast in boats hollowed out of single tree trunks.⁶

Archaeologists have found the Egyptian end of the line. At Berenike, a Roman port on the Red Sea, digs turned up more than three thousand peppercorns, and a large storage jar that held seven and a half kilograms more.⁸

Pliny the Elder could not see the point of it. Other foods won people over with their sweetness or their looks, he wrote, but pepper had nothing going for it except its bite, "and yet it is for this that we import it all the way from India! Who was the first to make trial of it as an article of food?"⁹ In Rome a pound of black pepper cost four denarii.⁹

The serpents of the pepper forest

Five centuries after Pliny, Bishop Isidore of Seville put a better story in his encyclopedia. The pepper tree grows in India, on the sunny side of the Caucasus. Serpents guard its forests. When the pepper is ripe the people set the forests on fire, the serpents flee the flames, and the fire turns the pepper black.¹⁰

In 1348 a Florentine friar saw the vines for himself. Giovanni de' Marignolli had left the Pope's court nine years before, as his envoy to the Mongol emperor of China. On his way home he landed at Columbum, today's Kollam, "where the whole world's pepper is produced," and stayed for fourteen months.¹¹

The pepper grew on vines planted like vineyards. Its clusters were green at first, then almost like bunches of grapes, "and they have a red wine in them which I have squeezed out on my plate as a condiment." When the clusters had shrivelled on the vine in the heat, they were knocked off with sticks and caught on linen cloths.¹¹

"These are things that I have seen with mine eyes and handled with my hands," he wrote. Nobody roasted the pepper, "as authors have falsely asserted," and it grew in gardens, not forests.¹¹ The gardens and the public pepper scales belonged to the local Christians of St Thomas. As the Pope's legate he was paid out of the scales' takings, a hundred small gold coins a month, and a thousand when he left.¹¹

Christians and spices

Calicut, May 1498. Vasco da Gama's ships had sailed round Africa to the coast where the pepper grew. He sent one of his convicts ashore, and two Moors from Tunis who spoke Castilian and Genoese greeted the man with "May the Devil take thee! What brought you hither?"¹²

He told them the Portuguese had come "in search of Christians and of spices."¹²

They found the spices. Calicut grew "much ginger and pepper and cinnamon" of its own.¹² The Christians were a mistake. The Portuguese took the Hindus of Calicut for fellow Christians. Shown into a temple, João de Sá knelt beside da Gama and said, "If these be devils, I worship the true God." Da Gama smiled.¹²

Four years later he came back with some twenty ships, to avenge about fifty Portuguese killed when a crowd stormed their new trading post at Calicut.¹³ Off the coast he took a ship bringing pilgrims home from Mecca, stripped it of its goods, took its children to be made friars in Lisbon, and had it set on fire. The passengers put the fire out and fought back until dark. All night they could be heard calling on the Prophet to save them from the Christians. At dawn the ship was fired again. Of the three hundred left on board, thirty of them women, not one escaped alive.¹³

At Calicut the king sent out a Brahmin to talk peace, dressed in the habit of a friar killed there, so that the ships would let him near. Da Gama gave him a safe-conduct, then held him, and bombarded the city all day.¹⁴

When rice ships sailed in from the Coromandel coast, he had the hands, ears and noses of all their crews cut off, their feet tied, and their teeth knocked down their throats so they could not bite the knots loose. They were heaped in one boat under mats and dry leaves, and it was set on fire and sailed at the shore. One chronicler put their number at more than eight hundred.¹⁴

The Brahmin followed in a smaller boat with the severed pieces, mutilated the same way, his own hands hung round his neck with a palm-leaf letter. It told the king to have a curry made of what his friar brought him. On the beach people ran to put out the fire and pull out anyone still alive.¹⁴

A sharp taste in Copenhagen

Copenhagen, 15 February 1820. Hans Christian Ørsted, a chemist and physicist, writes to a German journal. The new alkaloids being found in plants had sent him back to an old study of pepper, and on taking it up again he "easily discovered" a new one. He called it simply piperine.¹⁵

Its solution tasted exceedingly sharp, and it turned turmeric paper brown, the chemists' test for an alkali.¹⁵ Piperine is what gives pepper its bite.¹⁶

Five months later Ørsted published the experiment that won him the Royal Society's Copley Medal, an electric current swinging a compass needle.¹⁷ Piperine waited a long time for its turn.

In 1981 C. K. Atal and two colleagues set out to test an old habit of Ayurveda. A great many of its prescriptions add trikatu, a mix of long pepper, black pepper and ginger. In their animal tests piperine more than doubled the level of a test drug in the blood.¹⁸ In 1998 a team in Bangalore gave volunteers curcumin, from turmeric, with and without piperine.¹⁹ Pepper and turmeric were back together, as on Ørsted's test paper. Most studies of piperine in people now pair it with curcumin or another active, and what they found is in the Research tab.²⁰

The rotten meat that wasn't

Plenty of people still believe that medieval cooks heaped pepper on their meat to hide that it had gone off.³

Follow it back and the trail keeps arriving at the same book. In 1939 the biochemist Jack Drummond and his co-author Anne Wilbraham published The Englishman's Food. "The popularity of strong seasoning for meat," they wrote, "was undoubtedly due to the frequency with which it was necessary to mask taint."²¹ They gave no evidence for it. Their one example of a recipe for tainted meat was a 1594 tip for venison that was "greene". Green meant freshly killed, and the tip was a way to age it faster.²¹

Medieval London had its own answer to rotten meat. In November 1319 the market wardens brought the mayor two beef carcasses that William Sperlyng of West Ham meant to sell at the Stocks market. Sperlyng insisted the meat was good and clean. A jury found it "putrid and poisonous," from beasts that had died of disease. Sperlyng was put in the pillory, and the carcasses were burnt beneath him.²²

And pepper was the expensive part of the dinner. Spices cost far more than fresh meat, and fresh meat was easy to come by.²³ Pepper was never worth its weight in gold, either. Pliny grumbled that pepper and ginger grew wild, yet Romans bought them by weight, "just as if they were so much gold or silver." But a pound of gold was worth nearly three hundred times his four denarii.^{9, 24}

One peppercorn a year

In the end a single peppercorn became the law's idea of next to nothing. In 1959 the House of Lords had to decide whether three chocolate wrappers could be part of the price of a record. Lord Somervell thought they could. "A peppercorn does not cease to be good consideration," he said, "if it is established that the promisee does not like pepper and will throw away the corn."²⁵

Every April, in King's Square in St George's, Bermuda, the Freemasons pay the Governor their rent for the Old State House. He arrives to a seventeen-gun salute, and the rent is handed over on a velvet cushion. It is one peppercorn.²⁶

Alaric wanted three thousand pounds of pepper to lift his siege. Bermuda's Governor takes one peppercorn, on a cushion.