You wouldn't think Extreme Pepper Sensitivity Disorder (ESPD) would be a debilitating condition, unless you've met my dad. Even the faintest trace of pepper sears his mouth, as if he'd just crunched on a habanero chile. "Why does everything have pepper in it?" he moans, rejecting yet another soup made inedible by a few black specks. Now, I don't typically ascribe to my dad's culinary notions—after all, this is a man who once actually served me decade-old Raisin Bran. Yet I began to wonder, does everything have pepper in it?
And with that, I stumbled onto the food world's biggest conspiracy, which has cooks everywhere seasoning everything with pepper as if it were salt. Everywhere I looked, I saw it: Season with salt and pepper. In cookbooks: Season with salt and pepper. In magazines: Season with salt and pepper. Grilling steak? Season with salt and pepper. Making salad dressing? Season with salt and pepper. Sautéing greens? You guessed it.
The problem is that always using the two together confuses seasoning agent with spice, flavor enhancer with flavor. Salt is a non-negotiable, essential to making almost anything taste its best, while pepper has more in common with cumin and nutmeg. It is its own flavor, so why do we think it should go in everything? It makes you wonder what pepper-industry emissary snuck the notion, Inception-style, into our consciousness.
Pepper is actually the berry of the pepper plant, which grows in crowded, dangling clusters, like tiny grapes. Grown in India for thousands of years, its aromatic punch and slow heat made it the spice that launched a thousand ships: It inspired European voyages in the 15th century and was so valued that people used it as currency along with silver and gold.
But by the early 1800s, pepper's fortunes were down. Less than a century earlier, the chile had arrived from the New World. Eaters from Asia to Europe quickly embraced it, prepared for the burn of chile's capsicum by the tingle of piperin, the oral irritant in pepper. Take a look at the chile-to-peppercorn ratio in your next Indian or Thai meal and you'll see which of the two won the day.
Imagine, as ships stuffed full of chiles started sailing the seas, the panic setting in among the malevolent leaders of the pepper mafia, reclining worriedly on their beds made from gold bullion. Imagine the business cards they fingered, the names and addresses of knife-wielding assassins they collected, the letters they sent to old alchemists who might be able to poison the chile fields. But then someone hit upon genius: Get to the recipe writers, the cooks—tell them to season with salt and pepper! Whatever plot they hatched must have worked, because here we are, with one too many shakers on the table.
Don't get me wrong, it's not pepper itself that's nefarious. Rather it's the machinations that have led people to conflate it with salt—and therefore obscure its glory. All that constant, indiscriminate use dulls us to its pleasures, discourages cooks from showcasing its fine flavor.
I love pepper in its most familiar form, the berries picked before they've fully ripened then dried until black, when it's aromatic and sharp, with that distinctive tingly burn. I also love the slightly mellower white ones, which have been allowed to ripen and then stripped of their dark skins. I love coming across peppercorns when they're fresh and green, perhaps floating in a Thai curry and still clinging to the stem. They taste bright and vegetal, the burn replaced by a prickle.
True lovers of pepper know that it can be a showstopper on its own, the headliner of a dish, like Italian cooks who crush it into coarse chunks that punctuate the lovely, sheepy saltiness of cacio e pepe. Or cooks in Singapore who add so much black pepper to their classic, buttery crab that it becomes the dish's namesake ingredient. And I'm down with cooks who toss a five-fingered pinch of whole peppercorns into brines along with cloves, into stocks along with onions and garlic, and into Mexican salsas along with allspice. I wouldn't eat nearly as much Southern milk gravy as I do, if it weren’t for the relief from the richness that pepper’s lovable sting provides.
And so I've become a bit of a pepper zealot, calling out for an end to its mindless, constant use, instead to really focus on it when we do use it. But then, maybe someone doesn't like the sound of that, like that man who's been following me. That one, right there, with the dark glasses, and flecks of gray in his black hair…
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