Black, white and green pepper all come from one climbing vine
The pepper in your grinder is the dried fruit of a woody vine from South Asia. Pick it unripe and scald it, and it turns black and wrinkled. Soak ripe berries for a week and strip the flesh, and you get white pepper. Pink peppercorns come from a different plant altogether.
Piper nigrum is a perennial climber that reaches about 4 metres up trees, poles or trellises and roots wherever its trailing stems touch soil. Its tiny flowers hang in spikes, and one stem may carry 20 to 30 of them. Each fruit is a drupe about 5 millimetres wide, holding a single seed. The heat comes from piperine, a compound unrelated to the capsaicin in chillies; the chilli only borrowed the name pepper in the 16th century.
Colour depends on processing. For black pepper, green berries are briefly boiled, which bursts cell walls and speeds the browning enzymes, then dried until the skin shrinks into a dark wrinkled layer. White pepper is the bare seed of ripe fruit, usually freed by a week of soaking called retting; it is favoured in Chinese, Thai and Portuguese cooking and in pale sauces where black specks would show. Green pepper keeps its colour through freeze-drying, canning or pickling, and fresh green drupes rot too fast to ship abroad. Pink peppercorns belong to the cashew family and can trigger reactions in people with tree nut allergies.
Growers plant cuttings of 40 to 50 centimetres beside rough-barked trees, which the vines climb more easily than smooth ones. Plants start fruiting in their fourth or fifth year and typically keep going for about seven. Harvest begins when one or two berries at the base of a spike redden, since fully ripe fruit loses its bite and drops.
Indian cooks have used pepper since at least 2000 BCE. The Malabar Coast, in today's Kerala, was the main source, and the lost Chera port of Muziris exported it to Rome, Egypt and Yemen. Romans often lumped black pepper together with its relative long pepper, which only faded after New World chillies arrived. Wild vines still grow in patches of the Western Ghats, though deforestation has shrunk them.
Source: Black pepper
