Thinking About Pepper

Listen, children, to what the fiercest spice has to teach.

I was reading Elyssa Maxx Goodman’s excellent new history of New York drag culture, Glitter and Concrete, and it got me thinking about Pepper LaBeija, Mother of the drag House of LaBeija for 20 years starting in 1981. (She passed in 2003). You cannot forget Pepper from Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston’s 1990 doc of New York’s Ballroom scene. You watch her stunning entrance on the floor to walk in dark glasses and a voluminous gathered sheath of a gown in shimmering gold, with detachable padded hoops for sleeves, a pair of golden bagels blown up to luscious impossibility. (Or are they supposed to be ring-shaped shoulder pads, the ultimate power accessory of late-‘80s Alexis Carrington Colby fashion?) Pepper drops one to the floor. “Learn it,” emcee Junior LaBeija commands the audience of Ballroom children¹, “and learn it well.”

She’s giving spice.

In a later scene, when Pepper says to the camera that among all the Ballroom houses that she is the fiercest Mother. (Though maybe not as fierce as her Mother, Crystal, founder of the House of LaBeija, who famously read a crowd backstage after losing a drag pageant she was convinced was rigged in favor of white queens, fuming “I have a right to show my color, darling. I am beautiful and I know I’m beautiful!”)

Anyway it got me thinking about pepper—black pepper, the spice. You should know that right before those thoughts is that I got a delivery of Aranya black peppercorns from Diaspora, the spice company Sana Javeri Kadri founded in Oakland. Diaspora imports spices harvested entirely from particular farms in South Asia, a model perhaps learned well, in the Ballroom sense, from single-origin coffee roasters. It’s relationship marketing, which I’m into. My little canister tells me,  “Your pepper is grown on the Parameswaran family farm [in Thirunelly, Kerala]… Parameswaran and his son Akash have been regeneratively farming pepper for over 35 years, amidst passionfruit, jackfruit, and tigers (no, really).” I think even Pepper LaBeija would have agreed that you can’t get fiercer than tigers.

But then I started thinking about why pepper is so much in our faces—so ubiquitous, so mouthy. So important, to me and presumably a lot of Diaspora’s customers, to spend more for 1.87 ounces of peppercorns than I‘d ever feel good about dropping on any 12-ounce bag of single-farm coffee beans.

And then I thought about how degraded pepper has been for so long in the west. How it’s the inevitable accomplice to salt in table shakers and mini grinders; in teensy paper sachets for takeout, sealed up with bendy plasticware and a useless tissue napkin. Black pepper as the twin of salt in recipes for sprinkling prior to searing; for last-chance seasoning. As the stage magician’s flourish in the salad ritual of the yard-long restaurant pepper mill, which the French are said to call rubirosa in honor of a certain Dominican diplomat’s legendary dick: a device for thrusting black pepper literally in our faces.

“I think pepper is generally overused,” says Richie Nakano, the chef in San Francisco, via Instagram. “Most people think that it’s necessary in every single recipe as a counterpart to salt and it winds up being misused and can overpower a dish. Most dinners can be prepared without using pepper at all, but I think people add it without asking themselves why and what it’s adding to the food.” 

I’m there with you, Richie.

Does every savory dish need a dusting? Can we resist the universal pepper imperative? Can we learn to season with pepper less reflexively and more thoughtfully?

I wonder how much of black pepper’s monolithic status in the west has to do with its history as a Mediterranean, and later a northern European, power commodity.² The Romans worked up a taste for pepper relatively late, a couple decades into the Common Era, and they fell hard. Pliny couldn’t understand why the super-rich of Rome would lose their shit for it, but after the Goths seized the city in 410, Alaric is said to have extracted three thousand pounds of peppercorns as part of the ransom package that got him to leave.

A craze for pepper still gripped the late medieval mind. The thief and liar Columbus, gagging for pepper and other spices, rolled the dice on a westward sea route to Asia. He found no pepper in the lands of the Arawaks, and only piddling deposits of gold, but thousands of humans to force into slavery. Vasco da Gama landed near Kerala’s spice forests (probably not far from what would become the tiger-prowled Parameswaran family farm) after sailing around the southern capes of Africa, and this spread a grim new colonial shadow across the southern hemisphere. Europeans gave up some of the gold and silver they extracted from one network of colonies to acquire spices extracted from another: a reallocation of the sweat of workers they’d enslaved, all for a little zazz in their potage. (You can recreate this taste of late-medieval global capitalism by making Giuliano Bugialli’s Zuppa di Porri³, leeks stewed in butter and meat broth, ladled onto stale Tuscan bread and dusted all over with pepper.)

Europe’s pepper trade ran through Venice, then Lisbon, Antwerp, Amsterdam—cities that grew rich enough on spice to make themselves magnificent then and allow us to gawk today at what’s left of these colonial spoils. By the late 1600s though, professional cooks in France and Italy were easing up on pepper. As pepper’s value fell and it was no longer an exclusive spice of the wealthy or even the reasonably comfortable, heavy seasoning started to feel…basic. (Exuberant spicing lasted in northern places that were among the last terminals in Europe for the pepper pipeline, including Russia and Poland.)

This is where pepper gets interesting. This is the moment in the west when cooks actually begin to taste pepper. When they consider what it brings to a dish, apart from hotness and maybe a blanket aura of status. 

Crushed between my teeth, one of my Diaspora peppercorns opens up surprising lanes of flavor in a definite progression. It takes you first to a conifer sweetness like cedarwood, then draws you into a resiny shadow of nutmeg or mace, hits you with bright flashes of juniper, and leaves you with heat that lingers in a low register. It’s not an experience you need with every dish, like Richie Nakano says. You want pepper in a dish that can flaunt its progression of flavors, a dish like my friend Nik Sharma’s Black Pepper Chicken from his book The Flavor Equation. The meat ends up a gold every bit as dazzling as an ensemble by Pepper LaBeija, owing to the turmeric that simmers in coconut milk along with the pepper and other spices—a dish in which black pepper has a right to show its colors because it’s beautiful, darling. Learn it well.

1. Not literally children.

2. See Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization & Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Volume 1; also Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present; and Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food.

3. The Fine Art of Italian Cooking (1977), pp. 115-116