[Sca-cooks] More on long pepper, cubebs, and such....

[Phlip]

I'm involved in a conversation with Gene Anderson about Asian cookery,
relating to something completely seperate from the discussion on Cook's
List, and he just posted me the following, that I think y'all might find of
interest.

Ene bichizh ogsen baina shuu...

Yes on the peppers.  Long pepper and cubeb pepper are both very closely
related to black pepper, and very similar.  They come from India and
southeast Asia--I don't think anybody knows exactly where.  They succumbed
to chiles and to the increased availability of black pepper, slowly, from
the 1500s to the 1900s.  Grains of paradise, a.k.a. Melagueta pepper, is
(are?) an African cardamom, genus Aframomum.  They were wildly popular in
the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe, but gave way to a variety of
other spices as those became more available.  Indian cardamom (genus
Elettaria) was the main beneficiary, I think.  It's the only "cardamom"
known to the west now, except locally in west Africa where Aframomum still
exists.  But then there are all those Asian cardamoms--the "large" or
"brown" cardamoms of the species-rich genus Amomum.  Different species of
this genus are used all over monsoon Asia.  To be impossibly compulsively
authentic in your Cambodian or North Laotian cooking you'd have to seek out
the right species.  Actually they're all very similar and pretty
interchangeable.  They are quite a bit like Aframomum but very different
from Elettaria.  Elettaria has a pocket of heavy use in the Baltic area, esp
Finland and Sweden, because of the long history of seafaring to the Indian
Ocean.
Chiles not only displaced long and cubeb pepper, but also displaced native
East Asian hot (picante) stuff like mugwort and smartweed.  Smartweed has a
fascinating pocket of survival in Vietnam, where a particularly flavorful
kind exists that was too damn good to be displaced by anything.  It's rau
ram in Vietnamese and Polygonum sp. in Latin.  (I'm not sure of the
species--there has been controversy--it's one of those domesticated things
of rather obscure origin.)  Hunan food was famously hot long before
chiles--peppers, smartweed, mugwort, and Chinese brown "pepper"
(Zanthoxylum, actually a citrus relative) being the spicy things.
This is probably more than you wanted to know....
Thanks very much for the correspondence!!
best--Gene

Saint Phlip,
CoDoLDS

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well
please.
And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the
consequences. -- P. J. O'Rourke