“How sophisticated we all felt back in the dark days of the 1970’s when the moustachioed Italian waiter approached our table with a three-foot-tall, polished-wood pepper mill…” writes Charles Campion in “Real Food: Hot Stuff,” at Independent.co.uk (March 29, 2008). “Black pepper became the mainspring of fine dining and…the ingredients list of every recipe…tailed off with an identical mantra—add salt to taste and freshly ground black pepper.”
The world of peppercorns has changed since the 1970’s, of course. Foodie pantry shelves are now stocked not just with black, but also with white, green, and true red peppercorns—all fruit of the piper nigrum vine, but each is harvested and processed differently. And lately inventive chefs have conjured up dishes redolent of the exotics—flowery, but tongue-numbing long pepper, tailed cubebs used in medieval cookery, and fizzy, citrus-flavored Sichuan peppercorns. (Not all of these are true pepper; Sichuan peppercorns are actually a burr-like fruit of the prickly ash.)
For most people, though, pallid supermarket black pepper—sanitized beyond flavor or aroma—is still the norm. As Campion notes, “the idea that different varieties of black peppercorns from different countries could taste radically different comes as a shock.” In contrast, he cites chef Olivier Roellinger’s line of peppercorns from India, Indonesia and Vietnam: “…They all have distinct flavours—the Telicherry is flowery and fruity; the Wynad can be resinous; the Sarawak is warm and pungent; and the Vietnamese pepper is sharp rather than hot.”
Olivier Roellinger, incidentally, is chef at the Michelin three-star restaurant at Les Maisons de Bricourt in St. Malo. His website, with exotic footage from a forthcoming film by Christian Lejale, is a dream. I’ve always suspected that the French have a deeply sensual relationship with spices, and the lands in which they were born. This proves it.
Go here to read more about peppercorns on SpiceLines.