As I noted in my previous post, in this week's New York Times column I wrote about the recent discovery of the molecule that contributes the distinctive peppery aroma to black and white pepper--and to Syrah wines. Along the way, I also described some of the strange and not very pleasant aromas that white pepper can have, which range from barnyardy to plastic to medicinal. It was the plastic-medicinal quality that gave away the problem with some really bad pommes purées at a Midtown restaurant: they had been white-peppered to death.
In the printed version of the column, the third-to-last paragraph suggests that all white pepper carries these unpleasant notes. This is not true.
In this month's Curious Cook, I write about some really bad pommes pureés, the sometimes strange flavors of white pepper, and new research on Shiraz wines that revealed the key to pepperiness.
There's an error that crept into the printed column during the editing, and a number of interesting facts that didn't make the cut. More on these in my next post.
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Wood, C. et al. From wine to pepper: rotundone, an obscure sesquiterpene, is a potent spicy aroma compound. J. Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2008, 56: 3738-44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jf800183k
In a second study of chilli pungency in the wild, Tewksbury, Levey, and colleagues summarize current views of the evolution of Capsicum species, and report on several years of surveying chilli populations in the semiarid countryside of southeastern Bolivia, the region where their spiciness may have originated. They found mixed populations of pungent and non-pungent plants, and pungency seems to be associated with higher elevations and possibly greater stress.
The paper on chilli archaeology that I described a couple of days ago included two recent references that caught my eye, both by Joshua J. Tewksbury at the University of Washington, Douglas J. Levey of the University of Florida, and various colleagues. They add to our understanding of why it is that chillis evolved to accumulate the chemical, capsaicin, that makes their fruits pungent.
Spices and herbs are stimulants. Not necessarily pharmacological, but sensory: they stimulate our senses of taste and smell in foods that are otherwise bland. The human diet must have gotten a little boring when our ancestors first learned to cultivate grains and root crops and began to lean heavily on these starchy staffs of life, after millions of years of eating this and that as hunter-gatherers. So when did humans start spicing up their monotonous new diet? Very early--in the Americas, even before the widespread use of cooking pots, according to a new report on the archaeology of the chilli "pepper." A group of fifteen scientists led by Linda Perry of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History published their results in this week's Science.
