Lindow Stew & Long Pepper

I'm going to call this creation Lindow Stew - it tastes great, but there's no denying it resembles nothing so much as one of those ancient bodies pulled out of a peat bog!

On the plus side it's a no-brainer to make, especially if you own a crockpot (slow cooker) with an automatic setting like I do. The one I have is small, only taking about 1.8 litres, so if you have a bigger one, add more liquid. Just throw the recipe together in the morning before work, and you'll come home to the delicious scent of chicken stew wafting through the house. The prunes and their sauce add richness and depth to the meat as well as visual entertainment. Add some cooked rice or a salad as an accompaniment, and dinner is served...

Lindow Stew
4 - 5 chicken thighs, skinned
1 large red onion, diced
1 can of prunes in syrup
1 cup of white wine
½ tsp long pepper, ground

1. Put the chicken thighs, onion, prunes (including all that lovely syrupy goodness they come stored in), wine and ground long pepper into the crockpot.
2. Turn on Automatic or Low setting. Leave for 3 -4 or more hours.
3. Serve!
   
   Note: You can use water or stock instead of wine if you feel abstentious, but it won't taste as good.

This recipe make use of my most frequently used cooking pepper for both modern and not-so-modern recipes; Long pepper.

Long pepper (Piper longum and Piper retrofractum)¹ is a close relative of Black Pepper (Piper nigum), but possesses a more complex, slightly sweeter and more firey taste. It has an unusual rod-like shape rather like an elongated pinecone, or as Wikipedia says "the fruit of the pepper consists of many minuscule fruits — each about the size of a poppy seed — embedded in the surface of a flower spike".

Long pepper has a slightly higher content than black pepper of piperine, the pungent component of peppers. The taste is quite distinctive and to my mind it's by far the more interesting pepper. It also has a lovely smell (please note however, that snorting it up your nose is not recommended! Not that I've ever done that).

Although nowadays it's only beginning to impinge on the consciousness of the general household cook, in medieval times long pepper was a popular spice with the well-to-do, and had been for centuries. It was imported from South East Asia and arrived in Europe before black pepper did. The earliest Western documentation for pepper comes around 400 BCE, from the physician Hippocrates, in a medical context. In the third century BCE the Greek philosopher Theophrastus describes long pepper in his work Historia Plantarum (Enquiry into Plants), as "long and black, with small seeds like those of the poppy, the stronger of the two..."².

Long pepper also enjoyed an enormous amount of culinary popularity in Roman times. In the 1st century CE Pliny the Elder complains in his Historia Naturalis about the prices of piper longum and piper nigum, considering them much too high for this spice; long pepper cost 60 sestertius, white pepper 28 sestertius and black pepper 16 sestertius a pound. During the reign of Nero (when this work was written), a cup of house wine cost a quarter of a sestertius, 6.5 kg of wheat cost 3 sestertius, and a tunic cost 15 sestertius.³ The normal daily wage for an unskilled labourer or common soldier was about 4 sestertius at the time. So by no means a cheap spice.

As with most spices in ancient and medieval times, long pepper had medicinal purposes as well as culinary (in fact, the two purposes blended much more closely together in those times than they do nowadays), and is mentioned as a component of health-fortifying spiced wine recipes. Although both types of peppers were superseded in fashionable appeal after the fourteenth century by the spice 'grains of paradise', long pepper fell out of general use upon the discovery of the New World and the more easily grown and imported American chilli pepper.

Nowadays long pepper is mostly used in Indonesian, Malay, Indian and North African - particularly Ethiopian - food. You won't find it in a general store, but online vendors or The Spice Shop will stock it. Ethnic grocers are also probably a good place to try. If you live or work near an African restaurant, beg them for the name of their long pepper supplier - you won't be disappointed at the trouble you went to once you get your hands on some.

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Bibliography
FAAS, P. Around the Roman Table Translation, Macmillan 2003; ISBN 033390466
KATZER, G. Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages
MILLER, J.I. The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire Oxford University Press, 1969. Reprinted 1998; ISBN 0198142641
SCULLY, T. The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages Boydell & Brewer, 1997; ISBN 0851154301

Notes
1. Piper retrofractum from Indonesia has rods a little bit smaller than Piper longum from India (Bengal pepper). In Western countries, mostly the latter is available. - Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages
2. Theophrastus describes the second pepper as "round and reddish, with a kelujoz or capsule", which Miller considers to be Malabar cardamom, which the Romans also termed a pepper. Miller STRE pp.72-3. This could also possibly refer to grains of paradise however.
3. FAAS, P. Around the Roman Table Appendix, p.350

Comments

[Colon Cleanse Geek]

This Lindow Stew sounds terrific for a frosty winter spell, its -22 outside. Love the sound of canned prunes/syrup to add a delicate flavor to this crockpot chicken, thanks for sharing:-)

[Christina]

Hope you enjoy it!