Mondo Knows Facts
Long pepper was prized before black pepper
Roman cooks preferred the catkin shaped spice, which packs more heat Long pepper is the dried flower spike of Piper longum, a vine from India, and it was the pepper of Roman kitchens and medieval Europe. It is hotter and more complex than black pepper, with a sweet resinous note. Cheaper black pepper and later chilli peppers pushed it out of most European cooking. It sits in Mondo's food collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
Black, green and white peppercorns are the same fruitOnly the harvest time and processing differ between themBlack pepper once paid taxes and ransomsThe dried berry was worth more than silver by weight in medieval EuropeVanilla reached Europe in the sixteenth centurySpanish ships carried cured pods home from Mexico along with chocolateCloves grew only in the MoluccasThe dried flower buds came from a few islands in eastern IndonesiaCinnamon reached Rome through middlemenRoman cooks burned it in perfume and medicine without knowing the treeVasco da Gama opened the sea route to IndiaFour ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached Calicut in 1498
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Tags: pepper, rome, spice-trade
Long pepper was prized before black pepper: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Roman cooks preferred the catkin shaped spice, which packs more heat. The figure is taken from Smithsonian Institution, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a food fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Food shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.