The pepper vine or climbing shrub is mentioned by Sir John Mandeville in his travels of 1322 to 1356 as follows: “The pepper growethe in manere as doth a wylde vine that is planted fast by the trees of the woodee for to susteynen it by, as doth the vyne and fruyt thereof hangethe in manere as Reysinges; and the tree is so thikke charged that it semethe that it wolde breke, and when it is ripe it is all grene as it were ivy berryes; and then men kytten them as men doe the vynes and then they putten it upon an owven and there it waxeth blak and crisp.”
This simple description will in some respects answer our purpose at the present time. The leaf of the pepper vine is entire, simple, alternate, without stipules, broad, and fleshy, or oval or heart-shaped. The leaves are arranged in clusters of five to seven in number, opposite the flower stalk, and the flowers, which are glossy-white, are very insignificant in appearance upon a long slender pendulous spadix. They are for the most part uni-sexual, either manœcious or diœcious; that is, the staminate (male flower) and pistillate (female) flowers are separate either upon different branches of the same plant (manœcious) or upon different plants (diœcious). The leaves are four to six inches long, and they partake strongly of the aromatic and peculiar smell and pungent taste of the berry. The small fruit grows loosely on the pendulous fruit stalks or spikes. A single vine will bear from twenty to thirty fruit spikes and each spike contains twenty to forty berries. If they were allowed to ripen, the berries would lose some of their pungency and would gradually fall off.
The pepper vine produces two crops annually, the first in December and January, at the time of the first monsoon. The flowers of the second crop appear in March and April, at the time of the little monsoon, and the crop is gathered in July and August. The second crop is inferior both in quality and quantity, probably on account of lack of moisture. The pepper berry is a small, round, sessile, fleshy fruit, which at first appears green, next red, and finally yellow when fully ripe. When one or two berries at the base of the spike begin to turn red the entire spike is pinched off.
In gathering the fruit, the natives make use of a small triangular ladder made of bamboo, with which they go around the tree and reach all the fruit as they go. The fruit is put in small baskets slung over the shoulder (see illustrations) of the gatherer. It is then taken by those who work on the ground to a smooth, level spot of clean, hard ground and spread on mats or platforms to dry (mat drying is said to give heavier returns), care being taken to carry it in at night so as to escape the dews. After three days, as the drying proceeds, the berries are removed by rubbing with the hands and are picked clean or winnowed in large round sieves. In some eastern localities mills operated by hand facilitate the work. After the berries have become dry they will shrivel and turn black or chocolate. Those gathered too soon will after being dried become dust.
The berries after drying are spherical and about one-fifth of an inch in diameter and are wrinkled on the surface, indistinctly pointed below by the remains of a very short pedical and crowned by three or four lobed stigmas. The thin pericarp tightly encloses a single seed, the embryo of which, on account of the premature gathering is not fully developed and is replaced by the cavity below the apex. The seed itself contains within the thin red-brown testa a shining albumen of angular, radically arranged, large-celled parenchyme, gray and horny without and mealy within.
The transverse section of a grain of pepper exhibits a soft, yellowish epidermis covering; the outer pericarp is formed of a closely packed yellow layer of large and most radically arranged thick-walled cells, most of which are colorless and loaded with starch; others contain a soft, yellowish, amorphous mass, each containing in its minute cavity a quantity of dark-brown resin, while the middle layer of the pericarp consists of starch and oil, the shrinkage of which causes the deep wrinkles on the surface of the berry. The next inner layer of the pericarp exhibits its circumference tangentially arranged soft parenchyme, the cells of which possess either spiral striation or spiral fibers, but towards the interior lose parenchyme free from starch and containing very large oil cells. The testa is formed in the first place of a row of small yellowish thick-walled cells, next to which follows the true testa as a dense, dark-brown layer of lignified cells, the individual outlines of which are indistinguishable. If thin slices are kept under glycerine for some time these masses are slowly transformed into needle-shaped crystals of piperine. The angular cells of the interior of the seed are, of course, the more prominent and, when once seen, their characteristic form and contents are easily recognized again. The structure of the outer coats is made out with more difficulty, and before attempting to do so on ground pepper it is best to soften some whole black and white pepper corns in glycerine and cut sections from various parts of the exterior of the berry.
White pepper, since it is allowed to ripen fully, has the most distinctness, and, since it lacks the wrinkles, it will not be found difficult to pick out three layers of different cells from a section from it mounted in glycerine, composing the outer coat of the corn, besides angular large cells of the interior which are filled with starch and piperine, the latter being yellow in color. The first of these layers, the outer one, is made of colorless, large, loosely arranged cells with some fibers toward the exterior more compact than those toward the interior of the layer and carrying globules of oil. This layer makes up the principal part of the husk of the white pepper. The second layer is a part of what is generally called the testa and consists of small yellow cells, thick walled and closely oppressed. Next comes the third layer and second portion of the testa, which consists of lignified brown cells, which in their transverse appearance resemble some of the cells of mustard hulls. The individuality of these cells is not made out easily, owing to the thickness of the walls. After the observer has become thoroughly familiar with these appearances of the white pepper he should examine ground pepper, which will be found to differ in the way in which these coats are to be presented; they can be recognized, however, and must be studied until thoroughly understood.
The black pepper is not as simple in its arrangement as the white, the maturity of the white giving it distinctness, while the shrunken character of the black berry makes the recognition of its various tissues difficult. In a section from the exterior of a softened black pepper, the interior coats, after what has been learned of the white, will be quickly recognized, but they are not plainly developed. The coats of the outer pericarp, which in the white pepper were wanting, will be found to be darker colored, shrunken and confused, so that it requires much study to discover the forms of the cells, which may be more easily found in the powdered black pepper; there the structure already recognized in the ground white pepper will be seen and in addition dark-brown particles, portions of the outer coats. Careful examinations of different particles will reveal some which consist of the elongated, vertical exterior cells containing resin, while others are the shrunken parenchyme cells of the second layer, whose structure is indistinct.
The colored portion of a ground black pepper divides itself into two classes, the dark particles which have just been mentioned and the deep reddish ones which are made up of the testa of the seed and its adherent parenchyme. The two will be readily recognized and distinguished from adulterants by investigation.
There are in all about forty different species of pepper plant, consisting of herbs, shrubs, and trees. They are generally named from the city or country of export. The differences in appearance of the product coming from various sources are sufficiently marked to be readily noticed when samples of each are at hand side by side, but otherwise it is almost impossible to distinguish between some of them. The goodness of the pepper depends more on the quality of the soil than on the cultivation, although cultivation will increase the yield. The fine Tellicherry pepper together with the Alleppy are considered the best varieties. Tellicherry is named from the city of Tellicherry of British India, province of Maladar, district of Madras. Alleppy is named from the city of Alleppy, which is the capital of the native state Travancore in the district of Madras. These are closely followed by the Malabar pepper from the district of Malabar, India. These varieties are sun-dried. Next comes the fine Penang pepper, named from the city of Penang, meaning “betalnut” (see [illustration]) in the Straits Settlement. This is followed by the Singapore, named from the city of Singapore, and meaning City of the Lion (see [illustration]), which is also in the Straits Settlement, and is the largest export city of spice in the world, being the center of export for spices grown in the Malay Peninsula as well as in Java and Sumatra and of that rich state known as Johore, in the southern extremity of the Malay Peninsula.