PEPPERS

Pipalli is the word from which pepper is derived. Palli in Sankrit became peperi a few hundred years before Christ, thenPiper in Latin, the word we know today, and then a slow change over time from pevre, peivre to pèbre, peibre then poivre.

If cardamom is the queen of spices, pepper is the king, and its origins clearly lie in south-west India on the Malabar coast in the Kerala region. Brother Odoric, on a voyage in 1333, writes "they plant (in Malabar) pepper trees against the trees, as we do with vines, and pepper grows in bunches like grapes".

From ancient times to Vasco de Gama's return from the Malabar coast, thousands of years have passed in which the names of the most ancient cities have been evoked: Nineveh and Babylon, Memphis and Thebes, Carthage, Alexandria, Rome, Astrakhan, Peking... these names are often cited in Old Testament texts. Spices are often mentioned in the Bible, in terms of their use, the research they were the subject of and the trafficking that resulted.

King Solomon, Queen of Sheba, so many mythical names that echo in our heads and still make us dream of Troy battling with Jerusalem for control of the spices.

520 BC, Darius took up the idea of Egyptian King Sesostris who, to facilitate the import of spices from India, wanted to link the Red Sea to the Mediterranean... what an idea!

First as a currency of exchange, then as a monopoly, spices - and pepper in particular - enabled people to develop until the Renaissance, when prices plummeted, making them widely available throughout Europe. Find out more about the history of spices here.