Black Pepper, From a King's Ransom to a Peppercorn Rent

In the spice aisle, pepper is the jar nobody reads. It sits beside the salt, it costs a few dollars, and in my retail days the questions I got were about turmeric, or about cinnamon and blood sugar. Nobody asked about pepper. It just went in the cart.

That ordinariness is recent, and it was expensive to arrive at. For most of recorded history, the dried fruit of a vine from the Malabar coast of southwest India was one of the most valuable things a person could carry across a sea, pound for pound.

“The spice Rome paid by the ton to save itself is now the legal word for a payment of nothing.

Rome pays in gold

Roman ships were sailing for pepper by the first century. Pliny the Elder, who wrote the closest thing Rome had to an encyclopedia, was baffled by the whole business. Other imports at least tasted sweet or looked beautiful, he said; pepper’s only merit was its bite, and for that bite Romans sailed to India.¹ He listed the prices too. Long pepper went for fifteen denarii a pound, white for seven, black for four.¹ Later in the same book he added up the empire’s bill for eastern luxuries at a hundred million sesterces a year and blamed, in roughly equal measure, luxury and women.¹ Pliny was a grump about a lot of things. Whether or not his arithmetic holds, the complaint tells you what pepper cost a Roman.

Three and a half centuries later, pepper was still being counted alongside gold. Late in the year 408, the Gothic king Alaric camped his army around Rome and closed the roads. The historian Zosimus, our fullest surviving source for what happened next, says the Senate eventually bought him off with five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds of silver, four thousand silk robes, three thousand scarlet fleeces, and three thousand pounds of pepper.² The city didn’t have the cash. Officials stripped the ornaments off the statues of the gods and melted down a few of the statues themselves to make the weight.² Three thousand Roman pounds is close to a ton in today’s units. Alaric took the payment and withdrew to Tuscany.² Two years later, in August of 410, he came back and sacked the city anyway.

Venice buys low

After Rome, pepper kept coming west in two stages for a thousand years, by sea across the Indian Ocean to Egypt and the Levant and then by Mediterranean ship to Europe. By the fifteenth century the Mediterranean leg belonged to Venice. In 1496, four Venetian galleys came home from Alexandria loaded with spices, and more than two thirds of that cargo by weight was pepper.³

The economic historian Frederic Lane spent his career in Venetian ledgers, and one thing he found surprised me. Pepper didn’t get steadily pricier as Europe’s appetite grew. Venetian wholesale prices fell by about half between the 1420s and the 1440s and stayed low for the rest of the century.³ I’d have guessed the opposite. Supply was good, and the system worked, as long as you were Venice.

Then it stopped being the only system. Vasco da Gama’s ships reached the Malabar coast by sailing around Africa in 1498. His second voyage came home in 1503 with about 1,700 tons of spices, which one estimate puts at roughly a year’s worth of Venetian imports, and within a few years the Cape route was carrying about that much every year, eleven times what it had moved in 1501 and 1502.³ In Lane’s ledgers the numbers went up after the Portuguese arrived, and he concluded the new route hadn’t lowered the cost of spices for anyone, if anything the opposite. Adjust those numbers for the inflation American silver was causing across Europe at the same time, as two economists did decades later, and pepper got cheaper instead. Measured against other goods, it fell across the sixteenth century, in Spain, in England and the Low Countries, in Germany, in Florence.³ The rest of the slide, down to the jar beside the salt, took a few more centuries and a great many more ships.

A rent of one peppercorn

English law kept a souvenir. When two parties want a binding contract without real money changing hands, the law needs something of value to pass between them, and the something can be a peppercorn. The word survives in long leases as “peppercorn rent,” the token that makes the lease a lease. It isn’t a relic, either. The Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act, which Parliament passed in 2022, set the permitted ground rent on most new long residential leases in England and Wales at a peppercorn, and defined the term as “an annual rent of one peppercorn.”⁴ The spice Rome paid by the ton to save itself is now the legal word for a payment of nothing. I find that funny every time.

Back at the stove

Pliny never did say what the bite was. We can. The heat in black pepper comes from a compound called piperine, and piperine works on the same receptor in your mouth that capsaicin, the heat in chiles, works on. A 2005 study put the human version of that receptor, TRPV1, into cells and tested both compounds against it. Piperine is the weaker key, needing far more of it to get the channel open, but once it’s open, piperine opens it wider than capsaicin does, and then the response fades faster.⁵ That fits how pepper behaves at the table, a sharp hit that doesn’t hang around the way a chile does, though that part is my read, and I’d want a tasting study before I leaned on it.

Crack a whole peppercorn beside the ground pepper you already own and smell both.

Then there’s the reason pepper comes up whenever someone asks me about turmeric, which has nothing to do with heat. Turmeric’s active compound, curcumin, is absorbed very poorly on its own. In a small study published in 1998, healthy volunteers took two grams of curcumin, and their blood levels afterward were undetectable or close to it. When the same dose came with twenty milligrams of piperine, levels in the first hour were much higher, an increase the authors reported as two thousand percent, with no side effects noted.⁶ In rats the same pairing gave a much smaller bump, which is one reason I hold the human number loosely.⁶ That’s the study everyone is quoting when they tell you to put pepper in your golden milk. It’s one small trial from 1998, it measured absorption only, and it used a supplement-sized dose of the pure compound instead of a spoonful of the spice. I’d want to see it replicated at kitchen doses. Indian cooking has had turmeric and black pepper in the same pot since long before anyone thought to draw blood and check. Nobody put pepper in the dal because of a pharmacokinetics paper.

The mechanism is also the reason I keep the spice and the supplement in separate conversations. Piperine slows some of the enzymes your body uses to break curcumin down, which is how it raises the levels.⁶ It slows enzymes and transporters that clear many prescription drugs as well, so a piperine capsule can raise blood levels of medicines you take by mouth.⁷ The curcumin products built to absorb better are also the ones with reports of liver injury behind them, which the NIH’s complementary health center flags on its turmeric page.⁸

What I do with it is small. I grind black pepper over anything with turmeric in it, dal especially, because it tastes right and because the evidence points gently in that direction. I don’t buy turmeric for its curcumin, and I don’t tell anyone a dinner is medicine.

Keep the mill on the stove, where you’ll reach for it at the end of cooking, after you’ve tasted. Grind generously.