Penny le Couteur & Jay Burreson Read Online Free

red globular fruit within two to five years and under the right conditions continue to produce for forty years. One vine can produce ten kilograms of the spice each season.
    About three-quarters of all pepper is sold as black pepper, produced by a fungal fermentation of unripe pepper berries. White pepper, obtained from the dried ripe fruit after removal of the berry skin and pulp, makes up most of the remainder. A very small percentage of pepper is sold as green pepper; the green berries, harvested just as they are beginning to ripen, are pickled in brine. Other colors of peppercorn, such as are sometimes found in specialty stores, are artificially dyed or are really other types of berries.
    It is assumed that Arab traders introduced pepper to Europe, initially by the ancient spice routes that led through Damascus and across the Red Sea. Pepper was known in Greece by the fifth century B.C. At that time its use was medicinal rather than culinary, frequently as an antidote to poison. The Romans, however, made extensive use of pepper and other spices in their food.
    By the first century A.D., over half the imports to the Mediterranean from Asia and the east coast of Africa were spices, with pepper from India accounting for much of this. Spices were used in food for two reasons: as a preservative and as a flavor enhancer. The city of Rome was large, transportation was slow, refrigeration was not yet invented, and the problem of obtaining fresh food and keeping it fresh must have been enormous. Consumers had only their noses to help them detect food that was off; “best before” labels were centuries in the future. Pepper and other spices disguised the taste of rotten or rancid fare and probably helped slow further decay. The taste of dried, smoked, and salted food could also be made more palatable by a heavy use of these seasonings.
    By medieval times much European trade with the East was conducted through Baghdad (in modern Iraq) and then to Constantinople (now Istanbul) via the southern shores of the Black Sea. From Constantinople spices were shipped to the port city of Venice, which had almost complete dominance of the trade for the last four centuries of the Middle Ages.
    From the sixth century A.D., Venice had grown substantially by marketing the salt produced from its lagoons. It had prospered over the centuries as a result of canny political decisions that let the city maintain its independence while trading with all nations. Almost two hundred years of holy Crusades, starting in the late eleventh century, allowed the merchants of Venice to consolidate their position as the world’s spice kings. Supplying transport, warships, arms, and money to Crusaders from western Europe was a profitable investment that directly benefited the Republic of Venice. The Crusaders, returning from the warm countries of the Middle East to their cooler northern homelands, wanted to take with them the exotic spices they had come to appreciate on their journeys. Pepper may have initially been a novelty item, a luxury few could afford, but its ability to disguise rancidity, give character to tasteless dried food, and seemingly reduce the salty taste of salted food very soon made it indispensable. The merchants of Venice had gained a vast new market, and traders from all over Europe came to buy spices, especially pepper.
    By the fifteenth century the Venetian monopoly of the spice trade was so complete and the profit margins so great that other nations started to look seriously at the possibility of finding competing routes to India—in particular a sea route around Africa. Prince Henry the Navigator, son of King John I of Portugal, commissioned a comprehensive shipbuilding program that produced a fleet of sturdy merchant ships able to withstand the extreme weather conditions found in the open ocean. The Age of Discovery was about to begin, driven in large part by a demand for peppercorns.
    During the mid-fifteenth century