Addendum to the Long Pepper brief

I've just acquired the book "Dangerous Tastes: the story of spices" by the excellent food writer Andrew Dalby. He has an interesting section on long pepper, which includes an elaboration on its disappearance from medieval Western cuisine. Rather than paraphrase him, I'm just going to quote the book verbatim:

"The fact that long pepper continued to appear in all the European medical books, and in some of the cookery books, until the nineteenth century is deceptive. It suddenly dropped in price in the later sixteenth century. Soon after that it fell out of common use, although it was still in the reference books. . . . The reason, perhaps, was the discovery in central America of yet a third 'long pepper'*, the chilli. This is quite a different spice but it was occasionally called 'long pepper' in Europe because it had the same shape and served the same purpose of adding a powerful hot taste to food. And the chilli was cheap: unlike long and black pepper it propagated easily; it was readily transplanted - as it was to Spain and Hungary, for example - and it will grow indoors or in a greenhouse even in northern Europe...  [Long pepper's] price eventually fell to only one-twelfth of that of black pepper, a price at which it no longer repaid the cost of gathering and transport."  p.90

The rest of the book looks equally fascinating, so if you've enjoyed other similar culinary history books, you might like to check it out.

* in addition to Piper longum and Piper retrofractum.

DALBY, A. "Dangerous Tastes: the story of spices",  British Museum Press, 2000. ISBN: 0714127205.