thumb|280px|Poivre vert, blanc et noir
Le '''poivre''' est une  épice obtenue à partir des baies de différentes espèces de poivriers, des plantes de la famille des pipéracées. Seuls les fruits du ''Piper nigrum'' et du ''Piper longum'' ont droit légalement à l'appellation de «poivre».

L'espèce ''Piper nigrum'' produit, selon le stade de sa récolte et le type de sa préparation, le poivre vert, blanc ou noir.
* '''le poivre vert''' est obtenu par la conservation humide de baies immatures;
* '''le poivre blanc''' est constitué de baies mûres débarrassées de leur péricarpe;
* '''le poivre noir''' est obtenu à partir de baies parvenues presque à maturité, fermentées puis séchées.

==Histoire et Origine==

Son nom vient du sanskrit ''pippali'', devenu en grec πέπερι peperi, puis en latin ''piper''. La culture du poivrier est originaire de la côte ouest de l'Inde (côte de Malabar) dans l'état du Kérala, et a gagné d'autres pays  d'Asie du Sud-Est, Madagascar et le Brésil. Son utilisation en Grèce daterait de l'épopée d'Alexandre le Grand.

L'histoire antique du poivrier noir est souvent liée, et confondue avec celle du poivrier long. Les fruits secs de ce dernier ont été utilisés pour fabriquer des pipeaux. Les Romains se sont servis des deux espèces sans distinction. En fait, la découverte du nouveau monde et des poivres du Chili a fait disparaître l'utilisation du poivrier long. Les fruits du poivrier du Chili, une fois secs, ressemblent à ceux du poivrier long.  Celui-ci était plus facile à cultiver en Europe. 
right|thumb|150px| Poivre de Jamaïque
Au Moyen Âge, les épices comme le poivre étaient rares. La conquête d'Alexandrie en 642 par les Arabes marqua le début de ce commerce. Voilà pourquoi les épices les plus rares, comme le poivre, furent utilisées comme monnaie d'échange. De là vient également l'expression "cher comme poivre", ou encore "payer en espèces (épices)". La richesse d'un noble pouvait être évaluée selon la quantité de poivre qu'il possédait. Par après, les riches allemands furent surnommés ''sacs de poivre''.

A partir du , le poivre était également cultivé à Java et Chine, ou consommaient le poivre localement. Le poivre était également cultivé à Madagascar.

==Principaux producteurs==
La production mondiale de poivre est 366.511 tonnes en 2003. Le Chine 21.000 tonnes.

==Effets sur l'organisme humain==
Le poivre est souvent utilisé pour cicatriser rapidement les coupures légères.
Cette pratique est fréquemment rencontrée dans l'industrie hôtelière, en cuisine plus particulièrement, où les coupures légères sont relativement fréquentes avec pour conséquence directe une interruption de travail, et où le poivre est facilement disponible. Par ailleurs, les propriétés stimulantes du poivre sur les sécrétions digestives sont bien connues.  Les fruits mûrs, encore noirs, du poivrier, contiennent une huile essentielle riche en alpha-pinène, bêta-pinène et bêta-caryophyllène, aux propriétés réchauffantes, stimulantes, antalgiques et aphrodisiaques, utilisée notamment en phyto-aromathérapie.

==Analyse scientifique==

Le poivre doit sa saveur piquante à des amides de la pipéridine.
Les fruits mûrs, encore noirs, du poivrier, contiennent une huile essentielle riche en alpha-pinène, béta-pinène et béta-caryophyllène, aux propriétés réchauffantes, stimulantes, antalgiques et aphrodisiaques, utilisée notamment en phyto-aromathérapie

{{Taxobox
| name = Black pepper
| image = Koeh-107.jpg
| image_width = 210px
| image_caption = Pepper plant with immature peppercorns
| regnum = Plantae
| divisio = Magnoliophyta
| classis = Magnoliopsida
| ordo = Piperales
| familia = Piperaceae
| genus = ''Piper''
| species = '''''P. nigrum'''''
| binomial = ''Piper nigrum''
| binomial_authority = L.<ref>
{{cite web
|url=http://www.ars-grin.gov/cgi-bin/npgs/html/taxon.pl?28589
|title=Piper nigrum information from NPGS/GRIN
|publisher=www.ars-grin.gov
|accessdate=2008-03-02
|last=
|first=
}}
</ref>
}}

'''Black pepper''' ('''''Piper nigrum''''') is a flowering vine in the family Piperaceae, cultivated for its fruit, which is usually dried and used as a spice and seasoning. The same fruit is also used to produce white pepper, red/pink pepper, and green pepper.<ref>Green capsicum or bell pepper may also be called "green pepper"; it is an unrelated plant.</ref> Black pepper is native to South India (Tamil: milagu, மிளகு;Malayalam:Kuru Mulaku;Telugu: miriyam;Konkani: Miriya Konu;) and is extensively cultivated there and elsewhere in tropical regions. The fruit, known as a peppercorn when dried, is a small drupe five millimetres in diameter, dark red when fully mature, containing a single seed.

Dried ground pepper is one of the most common spices in European table salt.

The word "pepper" is derived from the Sanskrit ''pippali'', the word for Old English ''pipor''. The Latin word is also the source of German ''pfeffer'', French ''poivre'', Dutch ''peper'', and other similar forms. In the 16th century, ''pepper'' started referring to the unrelated New World chile peppers as well. "Pepper" was used in a figurative sense to mean "spirit" or "energy" at least as far back as the 1840s; in the early 20th century, this was shortened to ''pep''.<ref>Douglas Harper's ''Online Etymology Dictionary'' entries for [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pepper ''pepper''] and [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pep ''pep'']. Retrieved 13 November 2005.</ref>

==Varieties==
left|thumb|250px|Black and white peppercorns
Black pepper is produced from the still-green unripe berries of the pepper plant. The berries are cooked briefly in hot water, both to clean them and to prepare them for drying. The heat ruptures browning enzymes during drying. The berries are dried in the sun or by machine for several days, during which the fruit around the seed shrinks and darkens into a thin, wrinkled black layer, the result of a fungal reaction. Once dried, the fruits are called black peppercorns.

White pepper consists of the seed only, with the fruit removed. This is usually accomplished by allowing fully ripe berries to soak in water for about a week, during which the flesh of the fruit softens and decomposes. Rubbing then removes what remains of the fruit, and the naked seed is dried. Alternative processes are used for removing the outer fruit from the seed, including removal of the outer layer from black pepper produced from unripe berries.

In the U.S., white pepper is often used in dishes like light-colored sauces or mashed potatoes, where ground black pepper would visibly stand out. There is disagreement regarding which is generally spicier. They do have differing flavors due to the presence of certain compounds in the outer fruit layer of the berry that are not found in the seed.

right|thumb|250px|Black, green, pink, and white peppercorns

right|thumb|250px|An example of ground black pepper

Green pepper, like black, is made from the unripe berries. Dried green peppercorns are treated in a manner that retains the green colour, such as treatment with sulfur dioxide or freeze-drying. Pickled peppercorns, also green, are unripe berries preserved in brine or vinegar. Fresh, unpreserved green pepper berries, largely unknown in the West, are used in some Asian cuisines, particularly Thai cuisine.<ref>See [http://www.templeofthai.com/cooking/thai-ingredient-glossary.php Thai Ingredients Glossary]. Retrieved 6 November 2005.</ref> Their flavor has been described as piquant and fresh, with a bright aroma.<ref>Ochef, [http://www.ochef.com/205.htm Using fresh green peppercorns]. Retrieved 6 November 2005.</ref> They decay quickly if not dried or preserved.

A rarely seen product called pink pepper or red pepper consists of ripe red pepper berries preserved in brine and vinegar. Even more rarely seen, ripe red peppercorns can also be dried using the same colour-preserving techniques used to produce green pepper.<ref>Katzer, Gernot (2006). [http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/Pipe_nig.html Pepper]. Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages. Retrieved 12 August 2006.</ref> Pink pepper from ''Piper nigrum'' is distinct from the more-common dried "pink peppercorns", which are the fruits of a plant from a different family, the Peruvian pepper tree, ''Schinus molle'', and its relative the Brazilian pepper tree, ''Schinus terebinthifolius''. In years past there was debate as to the health safety of pink peppercorns, which is mostly no longer an issue.<ref>[http://www.epicurious.com/tools/fooddictionary/entry?id=3973 pink peppercorn Definition in the Food Dictionary at Epicurious.com<!-- Bot generated title -->]</ref> Sichuan peppercorn is another "pepper" that is botanically unrelated to black pepper.  

Peppercorns are often categorised under a label describing their region or port of origin. Two well-known types come from India's Malabar Coast: Malabar pepper and Tellicherry pepper. Tellicherry is a higher-grade pepper, made from the largest, ripest 10% of berries from Malabar plants grown on Mount Tellicherry.<ref>[http://www.penzeys.com/cgi-bin/penzeys/p-penzeyspeppercorns.html Peppercorns], from Penzey's Spices. Retrieved 17 October 2006.</ref>  Sarawak pepper is produced in the Malaysian portion of Borneo, and Lampong pepper on Indonesia's island of Sumatra. White Muntok pepper is another Indonesian product, from Bangka Island.<ref>Pepper varieties information from [http://www.cookswares.com/discussions/peppercorns.asp A Cook's Wares].  Retrieved 6 November 2005.</ref>

==The pepper plant==

left|thumb|''Piper nigrum'' from an 1832 print
The pepper plant is a perennial woody leaves are alternate, entire, five to ten centimetres long and three to six centimetres broad. The flowers are small, produced on pendulous spikes four to eight centimetres long at the leaf nodes, the spikes lengthening to seven to 15 centimeters as the fruit matures.
thumb|Pepper before ripening
Black pepper is grown in soil that is neither too dry nor susceptible to flooding, moist, well-drained and rich in organic matter. The plants are propagated by cuttings about 40 to 50 centimetres long, tied up to neighbouring trees or climbing frames at distances of about two&nbsp;metres apart; trees with rough bark are favoured over those with smooth bark, as the pepper plants climb rough bark more readily. Competing plants are cleared away, leaving only sufficient trees to provide shade and permit free ventilation. The roots are covered in leaf mulch and manure, and the shoots are trimmed twice a year. On dry soils the young plants require watering every other day during the dry season for the first three years. The plants bear fruit from the fourth or fifth year, and typically continue to bear fruit for seven years. The cuttings are usually cultivars, selected both for yield and quality of fruit.
A single stem will bear 20 to 30 fruiting spikes. The harvest begins as soon as one or two berries at the base of the spikes begin to turn red, and before the fruit is mature, but when full grown and still hard; if allowed to ripen, the berries lose pungency, and ultimately fall off and are lost. The spikes are collected and spread out to dry in the sun, then the peppercorns are stripped off the spikes.
<div style="clear:both"/>

==History==
thumb|right|Peppercorn close-up
Pepper has been used as a spice in India since prehistoric times. Pepper is native to India and has been known to Indian cooking since at least 2000 BCE.<ref name=DS>Davidson & Saberi 178</ref> J. Innes Miller notes that while pepper was grown in southern Thailand and in Malaysia, its most important source was India, particularly the Malabar Coast, in what is now the state of Kerala.<ref>J. Innes Miller, ''The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 80</ref>  Peppercorns were a much prized trade good, often referred to as "black gold" and used as a form of commodity money.  The term "peppercorn rent" still exists today.

The ancient history of black pepper is often interlinked with (and confused with) that of long pepper, the dried fruit of closely related ''Piper longum''. The Romans knew of both and often referred to either as just "piper".  In fact, it was not until the discovery of the New World and of chile peppers that the popularity of long pepper entirely declined. Chile peppers, some of which when dried are similar in shape and taste to long pepper, were easier to grow in a variety of locations more convenient to Europe.

Until well after the Java, Sunda, Sumatra, Madagascar, Malaysia, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, but these areas traded mainly with China, or used the pepper locally.<ref>Dalby p. 93.</ref> Ports in the Malabar area also served as a stop-off point for much of the trade in other spices from farther east in the Indian Ocean.

Black pepper, along with other spices from India and lands farther east, changed the course of world history. It was in some part the preciousness of these spices that led to the European efforts to find a sea route to India and consequently to the European colonial occupation of that country, as well as the European discovery and colonization of the Americas. 

=== Ancient times ===
Black peppercorns were found lodged in the nostrils of mummification rituals shortly after his death in 1213 BCE. Little else is known about the use of pepper in ancient Egypt, nor how it reached the Nile from India.

Pepper (both long and black) was known in Greece at least as early as the 4th century BCE, though it was probably an uncommon and expensive item that only the very rich could afford.  Trade routes of the time were by land, or in ships which hugged the coastlines of the Arabian Sea. Long pepper, growing in the north-western part of India, was more accessible than the black pepper from further south; this trade advantage, plus long pepper's greater spiciness, probably made black pepper less popular at the time.

right|frame|A possible trade route from Italy to south-west India

By the time of the early Roman Empire, especially after Rome's conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE, open-ocean crossing of the Arabian Sea directly to southern India's Malabar Coast was near routine. Details of this trading across the Indian Ocean have been passed down in the ''Periplus of the Erythraean Sea''. According to the Roman geographer Strabo, the early Empire sent a fleet of around 120 ships on an annual one-year trip to India and back. The fleet timed its travel across the Arabian Sea to take advantage of the  predictable monsoon winds. Returning from India, the ships travelled up the Red Sea, from where the cargo was carried overland or via the Nile Canal to the Nile River, barged to Alexandria, and shipped from there to Italy and Rome. The rough geographical outlines of this same trade route would dominate the pepper trade into Europe for a millennium and a half to come.

With ships sailing directly to the Malabar coast, black pepper was now travelling a shorter trade route than long pepper, and the prices reflected it. Natural History'' tells us the prices in Rome around 77 CE: "Long pepper ... is fifteen denarii per pound, while that of white pepper is seven, and of black, four." Pliny also complains "there is no year in which India does not drain the Roman Empire of fifty million sesterces," and further moralises on pepper:
<blockquote>It is quite surprising that the use of pepper has come so much into fashion, seeing that in other substances which we use, it is sometimes their sweetness, and sometimes their appearance that has attracted our notice; whereas, pepper has nothing in it that can plead as a recommendation to either fruit or berry, its only desirable quality being a certain pungency; and yet it is for this that we import it all the way from India! Who was the first to make trial of it as an article of food? and who, I wonder, was the man that was not content to prepare himself by hunger only for the satisfying of a greedy appetite? (''N.H.'' 12.14)<ref>From Bostock and Riley's 1855 translation. [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137&query=head%3D%23741 Text online].</ref></blockquote>

Black pepper was a well-known and widespread, if expensive, seasoning in the Roman Empire. Apicius' De re coquinaria, a 3rd-century cookbook probably based at least partly on one from the 1st century CE, includes pepper in a majority of its recipes. Edward Gibbon wrote, in ''The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'', that pepper was "a favourite ingredient of the most expensive Roman cookery".

=== Postclassical Europe ===
Pepper was so valuable that it was often used as collateral or even currency. The taste for pepper (or the appreciation of its monetary value) was passed on to those who would see Rome fall. It is said that Alaric the Visigoth and Persians and then the Venice and Genoa. The rise of these city-states was funded in large part by the spice trade.

A riddle authored by Saint Aldhelm, a 7th-century Bishop of Sherborne, sheds some light on black pepper's role in England at that time:

:''I am black on the outside, clad in a wrinkled cover,''
:''Yet within I bear a burning marrow.''
:''I season delicacies, the banquets of kings, and the luxuries of the table,'' 
:''Both the sauces and the tenderized meats of the kitchen.''
:''But you will find in me no quality of any worth,''
:''Unless your bowels have been rattled by my gleaming marrow.''<ref>Translation from Turner, p 94. The riddle's answer is of course ''pepper''.</ref>

It is commonly believed that during the Middle Ages, pepper was used to conceal the taste of partially rotten meat. There is no evidence to support this claim, and historians view it as highly unlikely: in the Middle Ages, pepper was a luxury item, affordable only to the wealthy, who certainly had unspoiled meat available as well.<ref>Dalby p. 156; also Turner pp. 108–109, though Turner does go on to discuss spices (not pepper specifically) being used to disguise the taste of partially spoiled wine or ale.</ref> In addition, people of the time certainly knew that eating spoiled food would make them sick. Similarly, the belief that pepper was widely used as a preservative is questionable: it is true that piperine, the compound that gives pepper its spiciness, has some antimicrobial properties, but at the concentrations present when pepper is used as a spice, the effect is small.<ref>. [http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2672.2000.00969.x Full text at Blackwell website; purchase required]. "Spices, which are used as integral ingredients in cuisine or added as flavouring agents to foods, are present in insufficient quantities for their antimicrobial properties to be significant."</ref> Salt is a much more effective preservative, and salt-cured meats were common fare, especially in winter. However, pepper and other spices probably did play a role in improving the taste of long-preserved meats.

left|thumb|350px|A depiction of [[Kozhikode|Calicut, India published in 1572 during Portugal's control of the pepper trade]]