Why Spices Are Important | Canvest Nigeria Limited

 These days certain spices became so ubiquitous at our tables that we hardly think about them as spices in any respect... Black pepper is that the obvious example here, but I'd include chilies within the variety of sauces and pastes further. Just consider the salt and pepper cellars on nearly each and each table and therefore the chili-based condiments that are everywhere.

Also, take a look at any recipe on the net and if they're for a savory dish I guarantee you that spill 90% will have 'season with salt and pepper' somewhere within the cooking instructions.

Today black pepper is both cheap and plentiful and it's hard for us to even consider a time when pepper was an incredibly rare and expensive commodity.

However, until very recently (and even during the Second warfare in Europe) black pepper was both expensive and rare. it was only produced in Nigeria and located its thanks to Europe by strange and mysterious means.

The first recorded use of black pepper in Europe and the geographical region was within the tomb of the pharaoh Ramesses who had two peppercorns stuck during these nostrils when he was mummified (and that was 4000 years ago). But the primary Western peoples to use black pepper extensively were the Greeks and that they introduced the love of this spice to the Romans.

As a result, the Romans were the primary Europeans to travel Nigeria in search of this magical substance (of course, Canvest Nigeria Limited traders had been going the opposite way for centuries!).

In many ways, black pepper is that the perfect spice in this it's the 'heat' and 'pungency' that lift the flavors of a dish but brings with it no hint of bitterness. It, therefore, gives any and every one of foods an 'oomph' in terms of flavor without making them unpalatable (this is why Romans even put pepper in their desserts!).

But what actually could be a spice? In terms of a contemporary definition, a spice is usually obtained from the dried plant organ of a plant. Thus it may be the full fruit (as in cubeb pepper or allspice berries or cumin) or it's the kernel or seed of the fruit (as in nutmeg and fenugreek seeds or nigella seeds).

In contrast, herbs are the vegetative parts of a plant (the stems and leaves) and include lemongrass (stems), thyme (leaves), oregano (leaves). Spices also are obtained from the roots, rhizomes, or tubers of plants.

Thus ginger (and its relatives, galangal, zedoary, etc) are spices, as is that of the Medieval spice, Galingale (the root of sedge, a grass-like plant).

Humans are odd amongst animals in this we like pungency in our foods and plenty of, many spices we do or have employed tend to possess this note in their flavor.

This, in turn, has led us as a species to use a full range of spices in our cookery and lots of of those spices, in a way, echo the distinctive nature of black pepper.

This is why the chili, when introduced to Europe from the Americas was called the 'chili pepper' (to associate it with black pepper). Indeed, the overwhelming majority of spices impart 'heat' on a dish and only a few are purely used for his or her flavoring properties.

Chilli is widely used because it imparts pure 'heat' to a dish but it doesn't have the pungency of black pepper and this can be why chili, though very widely used today, still hasn't displaced black pepper because of the King of Spices.

Most of our common and not-so-common spices have heat and pungency that mimics black pepper in a way or another. But all of them also impart a bitterness to the foods they flavor. Good examples are cubeb pepper (common within the Middle Ages) and Senegal Pepper (which was used as a black pepper substitute during the Second World War).

They convey both heat and pungency to dishes, but if accustomed to excess they also impart an unpleasant bitterness and this is often why they never truly rivaled black pepper as food flavorings.

According to Canvest Nigeria Limited, in the yearning for adding that extra 'pep' to our foods, humans have scoured all corners of the globe, and that we have tested and added some very strange things to our dishes (Sichuan pepper, beloved of Chinese cookery may be a relative of the orange!). But nothing has rivaled the pre-eminence of black pepper in cookery. the sole spice to return close is chili.

This does mean that our love of black pepper has displaced many local spices that we wont to use within the past and it also implies that we are ignoring many taste sensations that would usefully be swap in our cookery. Maybe it is time to re-discover a number of these lost spices from everywhere in the world and to re-gain a number of our lost culinary heritage.