The Thorngrove Table

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.

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

EBBP2 Report & "Maqluba" - medieval Arabic Lamb & Walnut Rissoles

Apologies for the delay - September has been a constant barrage of familial visits, out of town trips and the flu. None of them conducive to culinary blogging!

My EBBP2 parcel was sent by Carolyn of C.18th Cuisine and was a complete surprise to me as I'd forgotten all about the exchange! It was most beautifully presented in a wrapped and sealed tin, but alas I didn't take any photos as my curiousity overwhelmed any thoughts of photography.

Inside the tin I found a little treasure trove of dried staghorn sumac, dried currents (destined for baking I think), strawberry preserve (a delicious breakfast treat) and walnut preserve. I'm particularly fond of walnuts and as Carolyn suggests, they go beautifully with goats cheese so I'm currently saving that for the cheese course of a dinner party.

Sticking with the walnut theme however, I found a nice medieval Islamic recipe with walnuts with which to utilise the sumac. I'm unsure if staghorn sumac is the same as middle eastern sumac, but from the taste, they appear very similar if not identical. The recipe comes from al-Baghdadi, a mid-thirteenth century cookery text from Baghdad (hence the title of the text), which was translated into English by A.J. Arberry in 1939. Keeping scrolls of recipes was considered one of the signs of a gentleman in medieval Arabic culture, so fortunately there is a good collection of extant texts from that timeperiod (even though most aren't translated into English). There is currently a new, improved translation of al-Baghdadi being worked on by Charles Perry, the world-famous expert in medieval Arabic cookbooks and cuisine, but in the meantime the Arberry translation can be found in David Friedman's huge and excellent collection of medieval cooking sources, Cariadoc's Miscellany. Here it is:

Maqluba
“Take and slice red meat, then chop with a large knife. Put into the mortar, and pound as small as possible. Take fresh sumach, boil in water, wring out, and strain. Into this place the minced meat, and boil until cooked, so that it has absorbed all the sumach-water, though covered to twice its depth: then remove from the saucepan and spray with a little lemon-juice. Lay out to dry. Then sprinkle with fine-ground seasonings, dry coriander, cumin, pepper and cinnamon, and rub over it a few sprigs of dry mint. Take walnuts, grind coarse, and add: break eggs and throw in, mixing well. Make into cakes, and fry in fresh sesame-oil, in a fine iron or copper frying-pan. When one side is cooked, turn over on to the other side: then remove.”

Recreations and Bibliography...

Some spice shopping links

Perusing the Telegraph's Wine & Food section, I came across a good article by Rose Prince on the decontamination of spices, methods used, and which brands and supermarkets are safest and best to buy from. Sensible advice all 'round. As previously remarked, I'm less than happy about buying spices from my local conglomerate, so was happy to see her list of specialist shops, which is repeated here:

Hambleden Herbs
Soil Association certified organic herbs and spices. The herbs are grown on the company's farm in Somerset and the spices sourced from around the world (01672 569 025; www.hambledenherbs.com).

Seasoned Pioneers
These excellent spices and original blends are packed in airtight foil pouches to protect them and are stocked by Sainsbury's. None are irradiated or fumigated (0800 068 2348; www.seasonedpioneers.co.uk).

The Spice Bazaar
Non-irradiated or fumigated spices from a small family business in North Devon. Excellent, informative website (01769 550158; www.thespicebazaar.com).

The Spice Shop
None of the spices in this shop in Notting Hill, London, are fumigated or irradiated (020 7221 4448; www.thespiceshop.co.uk).

Steenbergs Organic Pepper and Spice
An impressive range of 95 per cent organic, fairly traded spices from India, Sri Lanka and Turkey that is beautifully packed in small amounts. Spice blends are made in Yorkshire. Fair Trade Madagascan vanilla pods will soon be available (01423 326563; www.steenbergs.co.uk).

I've used The Spice Bazaar's online shop, and was very happy with the service, postage speed and products (some herbs and a couple of spices).

The Spice Shop, of course, remains one of my utterly favourite stores in London. Walking into the tiny shop is like walking into a mini Turkish bazaar, crowded with rare and fine treasures of the culinary sort, and scented with their heady perfume. Information overload is inevitable and I never know where to start looking, although certainly I never escape with a haul of less than half a dozen items!

Poussin & Pink Peppercorns

In the grand tradition of the Great Whitecollar Hunter, last night I trekked over the vast expanses of the mega-market before locating, capturing and bring back my prey: two lovely little poussin. What is it about small birds that raises the predatory instinct? I'm unsure, but I always want to purr when I see one on my plate. . .

Due to the hour's lateness and hunger I prepared one of the birds quickly, putting it in an oven pan with slices of red onion and baby plum tomatoes, all drizzled with basil-infused olive oil and seasoned with pink peppercorns. 50 minutes later and accompanied by leafs of organic Little Gem lettuce, tasty tender little bird was on the dinnertable. Yum.

Pink peppercorns go very nicely with baby chicken. I'm particularly fond of their scent and odd, slightly resinous flavor. Loot from my trip to Hediard in Paris, the ones I have are large, yielding and loose-skinned with an ethereal sweet aroma and beautiful rose-pink sheen. Sadly all the jars I've bought in supermarkets previously have been small, hard and flatly-flavored, doing this lovely spice no justice at all, so I recommend only buying them at spice specialists or quality food stores (I must admit to being highly prejudiced against buying spices in ordinary British supermarkets, but history has supported my opinion).

Sometimes known as Peppertree or Peruvian Pepper, calling it a 'peppercorn' is a misnomer, as they're not actually a pepper at all but the berry of the Baies Rose (Schinus molle) plant, a South American tree totally unrelated to Piper Nigrum (the producer of white, green and black peppercorns) or any other member of the pepper family. It's actually more closely related to ragweed!