Black pepper

Rare card · No. 21543

Black pepper (Piper nigrum) is a flowering vine in the family Piperaceae, cultivated for its fruit (the peppercorn), which is usually dried and used as a spice and seasoning. The fruit is a drupe (stonefruit) which is about 5 mm (1⁄4 in) in diameter (fresh and fully mature), dark red, and contains a stone which encloses a single pepper seed. Peppercorns and the ground pepper derived from them may be described simply as pepper, or more precisely as black pepper (cooked and dried unripe fruit), green pepper (dried unripe fruit), or white pepper (ripe fruit seeds). Black pepper is indigenous to the tropical evergreen forests of the Malabar Coast in southwestern India, where the region's heavy monsoons provided the ideal environment for the wild vine to flourish. Serving as the ancient world's sole geographic source of the spice, the Malabar region became the epicenter of the early global spice trade, exporting this highly prized "black gold" to the Middle East and Roman Empire. Ground, dried...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen, Public domain