Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Spice guide to Long Pepper along with all the Long Pepper containing recipes presented on this site, with 5 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the Cornish recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain as a major flavouring.

Long Pepper, Piper longum (also known as Jaborandi pepper, Bengal pepper) is a flowering vine of the family Piperaceae (the same pepper family as cubeb pepper and black pepper) native to Indonesia. The plant is commercially cultivated for its fruit which is dried and used as both a spice and a seasoning. In fact, long pepper is a rather close relative of black pepper and has a similar flavour (though it is generally hotter). Though black pepper is the most familiar member of this family the word 'pepper' is actually dervied from the Sanskrit pippali which is the word for long pepper.

The fruit of the pepper consists of many minuscule fruits, each one about the size of a poppy seed, embedded in the surface of the flower spike. In pre-Renaissence times long pepper was as well-known a spice as black pepper and the Romans knew of both (though they referred to both simply as piper). Indeed, long pepper was often used because of its greater heat and it wasn't until the discovery of the New World and the commercial exploitation of chilé peppers that the use of long pepper began to decline; mostly as chilli peppers were easier to grow in a variety of locations. Today, long pepper is seldom used (which is a shame) though it can still be found in Indian vegetable pickles, some North African spice mixtures, and in Indonesian and Malaysian cooking.

Long pepper flavour is hot and warm, with sweet and somewhat earthy overtones (some compare it with moist hemp ropes). For accounts on sweet or pungent spices. The content of piperine (about 6%) is slightly higher than in black pepper (which is why some prefer long pepper for heat). However, long pepper contains less essential oil than its relatives (about 1%), which consists of sesqui­terpene hydro­carbons and ethers (bisabolene, β-caryo­phyllene, caryo­phyllene oxide, each 10 to 20%; α-zingiberene, 5%), and, surprisingly, saturated aliphatic hydrocarbons: 18% pentadecane, 7% tridecane, 6% heptadecane.

Piper longum is of South Asian origin (Deccan peninsular). However, it should be noted that there is also a closely related species, Piper retrofractum (also known as Balinese pepper) that comes from South East Asia and is mostly cultivated in Indonesia and Thailand (this is slightly smaller than Indian long pepper). Both species are often not clearly distinguished in the spice trade. Interestingly, when dried chillies first came to Europe they were often conflated with long pepper and some early recipe sources had difficulty distinguishing between them.



Long pepper probably came to Europe before the now dominant black pepper. It was highly priced during the Roman Empire — about three times the price of black pepper. With its taste pungent and sweet at the same time, it was perfect for Roman cookery especially fond of these two taste sen­sations. In our days, long pepper is nearly unknown and some­times hard to obtain. Interestingly, as long pepper is largely missing the terpene compounds found in black pepper, black pepper cannot be used as a direct substitute for long pepper.

Arab traders brought long pepper to North Africa quite early and it remains popular in many North African spice blends.