Pepper

Harvested from the piper nigrum vine, pepper is currently the most popular and frequently traded spice in the world. Pepper has been around for ages, with its use dating back to ancient Egyptian and Roman times. Arab sea traders originally supplied these ancient citizens with pepper, but kept its source a secret. Years later, the Romans and Greeks finally discovered its source. Over the years, this spice was considered so valuable that individual peppercorns were actually used as a form of currency during the Middle Ages.Fortunately, in today's world, pepper is grown in many locations and is easy to obtain. As any good cook will tell you, this is a good thing, as pepper is the most widely used spice in the preparation of food. Pepper is used both alone and as part of numerous spice blends to bring out the flavor in a huge array of foods.You can either spice up your meal with the traditional black pepper or go for the heat and spiciness of white pepper. The chili pepper is also well known and widely used to spice up all sorts of food. The primary species of chili peppers include capsicum annuum, capsicum baccatum, capsicum chinense, capsicum frutescens, and capsicum pubescen. These species of chili peppers offer varying degrees of heat and are used to spice everything from Tabasco sauce to red-hot chili.Chili peppers are sold fresh, jarred, frozen and dried. Of course, for optimum heat and flavor, buying fresh chili peppers is best, with frozen coming in at a close second. For the particularly health conscious, you can even find organic chili peppers and enjoy the scorching heat while staying reasonably free of pesticides and other chemical additives.