I come from a South Indian Brahmin family (this will become important in a bit) and while growing up in India have been a witness to the annual ceremonies to honor a dead grandparent. The ceremony is held on the death anniversary and basically involves an elaborate lunch served to a bunch of priests. As the years went on, with pressure from the younger generation, the lunch became simpler and we started to spend more money either as donations to charities or actually paying to feed the less deserving.
Back to that elaborate lunch. The rules governing the food are extremely stringent and super old and has led me to believe that it predates the “Columbian Exchange” mentioned in the OP. There are no green chillies, tomatoes, onions, potatoes etc. The only heat is from black pepper and the vegetables are indigenous (as far as I can make out). Unripe plantains, various type of yams and root vegetables, turnips and gourds, coconut etc. Many of these vegetables were very hard to find when we lived in the north of the country. Other spices that were used were sesame seeds, cardamom, long pepper.
The food was simply amazing! It burst with fresh flavor and was very healthy if you did not pile on the rice.
Got my long peppercorns in today from Spice House. Place of origin: Cambodia.
These are interesting. They are described on the pouch as “Earthy and hot like black pepper, but more complex with hints of ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon.”
Each peppercorn is about two inches in length, with a pinecone-like texture. The smell is earthy and spicy. To me, it’s like a mix of that sort of musty earthiness you get with turmeric, with accents of perhaps cardamom, maybe some cinnamon.
I cut off a black peppercorn sized piece and tasted: first three seconds, I’m getting nothing but maybe cloves, nutmeg, tempered with some earthiness and then, BAMMMM, just a blast of black pepper type of heat. Pungent, strong, peppery. This is seriously strong for black pepper. That pepperiness just lingers.
Interesting. How to you expect to use it? Grind-up a chunk? Toss it in whole? Or cut-off a piece and throw that in? The latter two I would expect you fish it out of whatever sauce you are making before serving, like a bay leaf.
Other “peppers” to try(only some are *Piper *species), if you could get hold of them, include cubebs, grains of paradise, alligator pepper, Ashanti pepper and grains of Selim. The first two should be in any decent spice shop, the other three one’d likely have to get from West African food specialists or online.
Cubebs and grains of paradise show up quite a bit in medieval recipes, so were well-known in the West at one time. Part of West Africa was known as the Pepper Coast or Grain Coast for its spices (it’s to the South of Negroland).
The only way I ever used P. longum was toasted and ground up in blends like berbere, garam masala, or bumbu. It’s a cluster of tiny berries, like pulykamell observed, like a pinecone. Or a very tightly packed catalpa.
The closest thing to what you describe I’ve found in America must be the Udupi restaurants. I’ve been to Udupi Palace in Maryland and Woodlands in Chicago. I enjoyed magnificent dosa thalis there. The strangest thing to my taste was a side of spice powder, a large proportion of which was toasted and ground tuvar dal. Miḷaku poḍi, I think it was called, literally ‘pepper powder’.
I expect to grind it up, but it would work as a whole spice, too. Basically, I’ll use it in the same places I would use black peppercorns. I suspect it would be good in something like a Keralan dry pork curry, something like this recipe, which is rather black pepper forward (at least the versions I’ve had here from Keralan families have been very black peppery.) Or, if I want to be more pure about tasting the long pepper, I may try it a la something like an Italian peposo. or possibly even a stir fry with oyster sauce, garlic, ginger, and beef. I’ll probably start by halving the usual amounts used, because this pepper seems to be a good deal more pungent than most black peppers (though I got some Lampong black peppercorns in with my shipment today, and those are probably close in heat level to the long peppercorns, too. My next shipment has Kampot black peppercorns coming in, so I’m excited to try all these varieties of Piper nigrum and Piper longum [in the case of the long pepper] besides the Tellicherry I usually buy.)