Very good article in today's NYT. For subscribers

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/29/di...=all&position=

On 10/29/03 6:04 AM, in article
, "butch burton"
> opined:

> Very good article in today's NYT. For subscribers
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/29/di...wanted=all&pos
> ition=

I read it and found it fascinating. I wish they would have explained white
pepper, red pepper, green pepper, etc.

Does it all come from the same climate?
--
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"When a broad table is to be made, and the edges of planks do not fit, the
artist takes a little from both, and makes a good joint. In like manner
here, both sides must part with some of their demands," Benjamin Franklin
(1706-1790)
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bitch TROLL burton writes:

>Very good article in today's NYT. For subscribers
>
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/29/di...&pagewanted=al
l&position=

Why didn't you post the article... duh!

October 29, 2003
Following the Pepper Grinder All the Way to Its Source
By R. W. APPLE Jr.

HEKKADY, India
OF all the distinctively flavored seeds, barks, roots, fruits and leaves that
we call spices, pepper is the most widely used, and for centuries it was the
most valuable.

In ancient times, the demand for pepper was almost insatiable; spicing meat was
the only practical way to preserve it, and pepper made salted meat palatable.
In that era, the vines that yield the small, well-rounded black berries grew
only here in the lush, lovely Cardamom Hills of southwest India. So many ships
came to trade for them that Cochin (now called Kochi) on the Malabar coast
became one of the world's great ports.

Alaric the Visigoth demanded 3,000 pounds of pepper as part of the price for
sparing Rome in the fifth century. In medieval Europe a small bag of black
pepper could be exchanged for a sheep. In the 16th and 17th centuries, pepper
was sold in Western capitals for 600 times what it cost in India.

The United States entered the pepper trade in 1797, when an intrepid New
England clipper-ship captain named Jonathan Carnes completed a voyage from
Salem, Mass., to Sumatra and back. Trading directly with the local inhabitants,
he circumvented the monopoly on pepper then held by the Dutch. Elihu Yale, a
Boston-born Englishman, built a fortune in the spice trade and contributed some
of it to a Connecticut university that took his name.

Even today, pepper is the constant companion to salt on the dinner tables of
the world, either in a shaker or (preferably, since it loses much of its savor
once ground) in a mill. Besides enlivening the flavor of everything from melon
to macaroni, it helps to promote digestion. Without salt life would be
impossible. Without pepper, it would be impossibly dull.

India has recently ceded its place as the world's leading exporter to Vietnam,
and Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia are also major exporters. But most epicures
consider Indian peppercorns the world's finest, particularly the extra-large
ones named after Tellicherry, on the Arabian Sea.

The climate and terrain here are very nearly perfect for the cultivation of
pepper. Both phases of the unusual twin monsoon in this part of India deliver
copious rainfall, making irrigation unnecessary. The region's soils furnish
ample nutrients for the pepper vines, supplemented by the small amounts of
fertilizer applied to crops surrounding them. And the slope of the hills
provides reliable drainage.

"But if Vietnam had started to produce high-quality pepper many centuries ago,
instead of having begun only relatively recently," said Thomas Phillip, the
managing director of Cochin Spices, a local processor, "it is quite likely that
the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and others would have gravitated there,
not here. And India might well never have been colonized at all."

Here where it originated, and where it provided the spark in local cuisine
before the Portuguese introduced chilies from the New World, pepper grows amid
other valuable plants, including vanilla vines, a species of orchid; tea
bushes, as carefully trimmed as a dandy's mustache, which tuft the hillsides;
and nutmeg trees, which produce both nutmeg and mace. Cardamom, treasured by
the Arabs as a flavoring for coffee, is yet another big cash crop.

But the visitor looks in vain for pepper plantations, whatever the guide books
may say. There are none.

Instead, pepper vines are trained to climb coconut palms or betel trees in
backyards, or silver oaks used as windbreaks on the tea plantations, or any
other tree with a tall, straight trunk. They have dark green leaves, ribbed and
leathery, and reach a height of 12 to 15 feet. Flowers bloom after the first
monsoon rains in the fall, followed by six-inch spikes of berries.

A FARMER named K. P. Mathew, who works eight acres near this trading village,
led my wife, Betsey, and me along dusty trails through a forest of spice trees
and bushes, across canals that are dry except in monsoon season. He told us he
was adopting organic, sustainable methods, like many of his colleagues.

"I burn coconut husks, roots and branches to generate the smoke to dry
cardamom," he said. "I generate gas for cooking and household heating from cow
dung."

It was a memorable stroll on a fine, cool winter's morning in the subtropics.
The mango trees were in flower, along with the pale blue ipomoea vines, and the
air was filled not only with the sweet smells of blossoms but also with the
songs of exotic (and exotically named) birds €” the red-vented bulbul, the
white-breasted green barbet and the rocket-tailed drongo €” identified for us
by T. P. Binu Kumar, a naturalist who came along on our walk.

A few of the berries, yellowish when they first emerge, then green, were
starting to turn reddish, ready for harvest by agile men who climb up
precarious one-legged ladders to strip the spikes from the vines.

After picking, the berries are laid out on rush or banana-leaf mats to dry in
the sun for five or six days. Any flat surface will do, and does €” a roof, a
courtyard floor, or a roadside. The drying causes the berries to turn black,
shrivel and become hard.

If white pepper is desired, for use in a sauce or something else that would be
marred by black specks, the raw berries are first soaked in running water,
which causes the outer skin to loosen enough so that it can be rubbed off.
Subsequently dried, they turn a creamy white. Because much of pepper's bite
comes from piperine, a chemical concentrated in the skin, white pepper is less
pungent than black.

Green peppercorns also come from the same vine, Piper nigrum. But they are
preserved in their green, unripe state, usually by pickling.

Many other seasonings are called "peppers" and deliver a burning sensation to
the tongue and palate but are unrelated botanically to Piper nigrum. Among
these are pink peppercorns (Schinus terebinthifolius), Sichuan pepper from
China and malegueta peppers from Brazil and Africa. Nor are capsicums,
including bell peppers and cayenne, from the same family.

Small farmers sell their pepper to high-country traders, who consolidate little
lots into larger ones for sale to processors in the coastal cities. One such is
Mr. Phillip's company, Cochin Spices, a subsidiary of Burns Philp, a big
Australian company, and a corporate sibling of Tone Brothers, of Ankeny, Iowa,
which sells Indian pepper under the Durkee and Spice Islands labels.

"For the little guy," Mr. Phillip told me, "the beauty is that pepper, unlike
most crops, keeps more or less forever. You take it out every year, dry it to
prevent mold, and stick it back in the warehouse. You sell it when you need the
money to get your daughter married or fix the roof or buy a car. It's better
than cash in the bank, because the tax man won't see it."

(There are big farmers as well. Tata Tea, part of the immense Tata
conglomerate, is probably the biggest; one year not long ago, or so the story
goes, it made more profit on the pepper grown on shade trees on its properties
than on coffee or tea.)

Cochin Spices ships peppercorns whole or grinds them to order for shipment in
huge containers all over the world. Processing is relatively simple. A series
of machines wash and dry the peppercorns, eliminating stems, sticks and stones
and other foreign matter, as well as "light" or hollow berries and "pinheads,"
which are undeveloped buds. Classification by size comes next, and then, if the
customer wishes, the pepper is steam-sterilized before passing through a dryer
that reduces the moisture content from 30 percent to the legally mandated 10 or
11 percent.

I had expected an overpowering smell when I visited Mr. Phillip's plant. Sure
enough, it was all but impossible to stay more than two or three minutes in the
rooms where chili is processed without experiencing smarting eyes and a runny
nose, but in the pepper-grinding room, all I felt was slightly stinging
nostrils. Pepper proved to be more mannerly than chili.

IN addition to the farmers who grow the pepper and the companies that process
it, there is a third significant element in the pepper business here in the
Indian state of Kerala €” the Kochi International Pepper Exchange in the heart
of Jew Town, an evocative old neighborhood in Fort Cochin, across the broad and
bustling harbor from the deep-water port at Ernakulam.

A few traders still maintain offices in Jew Town, but the numbers have dwindled
with the advent of secure telephone, telex and Internet communication. Although
Aspinwall & Company, founded in 1867, still occupies its fine old yellow
building, many of the shuttered houses with the Star of David worked into their
grills now house antique shops rather than burlap bags of spices.

Just enough warehouses remain on the congested streets to perfume the warm air
with a gingery-peppery clove-and-cardamom amalgam of aromas.

Most of today's action takes place, however, in the bland-looking building of
the Indian Pepper & Spice Trade Association. There, in an air-conditioned
second-floor room, 40 or so brokers in pepper futures €” some in Western
sports shirts, others in the white Indian loincloths called dhotis, all in bare
feet to protect the polished floor €” put up a hellish if episodic din.

Between napping and gesturing like a company of Barrymores, they shout and
curse into their telephones. They trade an average of 450 tons of Kerala-grown
pepper a day, or rather, six-month future contracts covering that amount. The
object is to bring some stability into what might otherwise be a cyclical and
rather chaotic world market.

"April €” 8875," one trader bellowed in a lingua franca unfathomable to mere
onlookers like me as CNBC's commodity statistics flashed across numerous
overhead television screens.

Some traders are members of the exchange; others act as brokers for large
firms, including American companies like Tone Brothers, the Harris Freeman
Company of Anaheim, Calif., and McCormick & Company of Baltimore, as well as
companies in London and Rotterdam. K. J. Samson, the pepper and spice
association secretary, told me that nearly all the floor traders were
Gujaratis, whose grandfathers came south from a populous state in northwest
India decades ago.

How much longer that tradition or others will survive remains unclear. The old
"outcry" system's days are numbered. Trading will move onto computer screens
soon.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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"Life would be devoid of all meaning were it without tribulation."