Pepper

I believe in proportionality. When there's a group of things, each thing should get a space proportional to how important it is. If a thing is more important, it should get more space. If it's less important, it should get less.

I'm a computer programmer by trade. My product is computer code. The craft of programming involves identifying good sections of code and bad sections of code. The bad code emanates what is called a "code smell."

Code smell. I love that term. It's so clear and concrete, yet so non-commital.

There are no hard-and-fast rules for what constitutes bad code, so a programmer must "sniff around" looking for clues, using their experience and intuition. A section of code that's disproportionately large given the number of times it's invoked ... that's smelly.

Disproportionate code can happen when a programmer's superiors say, "Add this feature, people will love it," and they're way, way off base. The trouble is ... that large section of unused code will continually trip other programmers up, wasting their precious time. Because they will think it does something important, when it does not.

But I'm not here to talk about programming. I'm here to talk about pepper. In particular, I have a question.

Why are all salt and pepper shakers the same size?

Everyone knows that salt than pepper is more important, right?

• Salt is considered an essential, elemental taste, along with sour, bitter, sweet and umami. Your taste buds are meant to pick up one of these tastes, so the craving of salt is an evolutionary thing, baked into our DNA.
• Salt draws moisture out of vegetables, which is then driven off making the vegetable flavor more intense and combined with browning to make sweet, utter deliciousness.
• Salt preserves things. Pickles and lunch meat wouldn't even be possible without it, and you'd have to eat stuff pretty much the day you caught or plucked it - the hunter/gatherer lifestyle. Salt let humans stay in one place. Salt enables civilization.

Salt is essential. No one will argue with that.

But pepper? What is pepper essential for?

Finding your food? You got this fluffy yellow omelet ... somewhere on your stark white plate. You lost your omelet, buddy. You sprinkle some pepper and "Oh yeah - there it is!" Wow. How very essential.

Pepper doesn't deserve a vessel as big as a salt shaker. Pepper is just a pain in the ass. Every seven years or so, you are forced to refill the pepper shaker. You first unscrew the top, and all the pepper that got stuck in the threads spills out, making you sneeze and blow black pepper all over the room.

And it's not even that tasty. You dip your finger into that preground stuff ... blughggh. You might as well sprinkle sawdust on your food.

Pepper. Why do we put up with this bullshit?

No Offense, But Pepper Is Just Plain Weird

OK, people do have their pet uses for pepper.

My father sprinkled it religiously on scrambled eggs, a habit I acquired before discovering Krystal Hot Sauce. Others like pepper on mac and cheese or a big chunk of bland beef or pork. Black pepper can play a starring role in dishes like cacio e pepe or peppercorn-crusted steak.

You can't deny black pepper is the undisputed champion of spices. It is the world's most heavily traded spice, and accounts for 1/5 of all sales. It is used in the cuisine of every single country on Earth.

From a Eurocentric point of view, black pepper went from being a luxury to a commodity with the opening of sea-based trade routes to China and India, where most pepper came from (today it's mostly from Vietnam). But that was like 500 years ago. It's not like celery or jello desserts, which started out as luxury items then, as they became ubiquitous, lost their allure.

Pepper is pretty damn popular for a 500 year old fad. How may 500 year old TV shows do you watch? How much 500 year old music have you listened to lately? (And shut up, Preston Trombley, we're not talking to you.).

Still. What does pepper taste like?

True, it's kind of hot. If you dump a tablespoon in your mouth, you feel it. But it's not jalapeno, cayenne, habanero, ghost-pepper hot. It's more like hot's wimpy cousin. Chemically, black pepper gets its hotness from piperine, which is 1/100 the hotness is capsaicin, the chemical of its mouth-exploding brethren. Sounds kind of superfluous.

As near as I can figure, pepper makes other foods tastes more like themselves. Sichuan pepper, which admittedly is very unrelated to black pepper, is said to "open the taste buds" and its numbing effect on the tongue ig unignorable. Black pepper seems to have a similar effect.

I adore the cookbook author Joshua McFadden, and one thing he has taught me is to always throw black pepper late in the dish. Salt should go early, but pepper should always be a late addition. And that point, you know what a dish should taste like, and whether it needs to be amped up. Pepper will do this if kept in check.

You don't want that eggplant dish to taste like pepper. You want it to taste like eggplant-on-steroids. Fortunately, pepper is cheaper than steroids - especially at Costco in the 1-gallon economy size box.

It's making a little sense now. Pepper is universal because it doesn't have a taste all its own. There are cinnamon dishes, and cumin dishes, and paprika dishes, and sometimes they even overlap. But you can throw pepper into just about anything - not just savory dishes, but on ice cream and fruit as well.

Still, I'm not convinced the pepper shaker needs to be same size as the salt shaker.

The United States of Spices

Then again, maybe I shouldn't be the one to judge. If you think pepper has a proportionality problem, dig my spice shelf - it's a proportionality disaster!

Every spice is in a bottle that is exactly the same height, and within a few millimeters of the same width, as every other spice bottle.

It doesn't matter one iota how important each spice is in my repertoire. Some are hugely important. Cumin and bay leaves are heavy hitters, and cayenne ... I used that for just about everything. You Chef John fans will sympathize. No dish is complete without a shake-a-shake-a of cayenne!

But the Caraway Seeds? Haven't touched them in at least 3 years. I don't even remember what they're good for except the "Everything" bagel ... which I have never made in my life. I don't even like Everything bagels. Who really wants everything on a bagel? Hell, everything past the 10,000th thing on a bagel is overkill.

Those Caraway Seeds are pissing me off. They don't deserve the little parcel of land they've got. They are taking it away from some more-deserving spice-I-haven't-seen-and-don't-know-about-yet. I reach for the Caraway Seed bottle, ready to dump the contents into the trash.

Then I stop. What if?

What if that one recipe that will change my life, the one recipe that I haven't read yet, the one buried on some web site beneath a slew of ads, or nestled in Ottolenghi's new cookbook ... what if Caraway Seeds are its main ingredient? I can't just not do that recipe. I might die unfulfilled. My deathbed angst: "If only I had not thrown away those Caraway Seeds!!!"

Everyone knows the WORST thing that could possibly happen is I'm forced down to the Piggly Wiggly for some Caraway Seeds to replace the bottle I just threw in the garbage 2 weeks ago.

No, no, no. I cannot let this happen. I put the Caraway Seeds back on the shelf. But first I give them a sniff just to see what I've been missing for the last three years.

Nothing. I smell absolutely nothing.

🤷‍♀️ Welp, at least they're not moldy.

I put them back on the shelf and life goes on.

Simmer Until All Hope Is Gone

If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm a total fraud when it comes to cooking.

I'm that "avid reader" who buys books solely based on the spine color. Though my bookshelf is the handsomest one in town, I have no idea what's in any of them.

OK maybe not that bad. Maybe I'm the equivalent of the modern grade school kid who needs a participation trophy. I know a lot of folks howl at that ... they take it as a sign of how far society has fallen, that we no longer value excellence. We value showing up.

But showing up is a value. If you believe that the winning team culled all of the benefits from the game and the losing team got absolutely nothing, I suppose a participation trophy is a big joke to you. But if you believe that just getting your ass off the couch is a value, then participation is worth celebrating.

I may not be the world's greatest cook, or even a passable one. But at least I'm trying, dammit! I got my ass off the couch. I didn't just give up and run down to Qdoba 3 blocks away from me

Qdoba. It taunts me everytime I set off the fire alarm searing a chicken breast.

"Craig! Craig!" It calls to me, "I have your dinner in a paper bag, all ready to go. It has haberno. It has queso. It smells great and it tastes like heaven. All I need is your credit card number. Craig, my child! Why do you suffer needlessly?"

I sigh. If only it had taunted me earlier. Now it is too late. I am 45 minutes into this damn recipe, and ...

Wait a minute. "Simmer for approximately 4 hours or until tender" ???

4 hours???? Goddammit!!!

I open the spice cupboard. My little bleacher of spices is cheering me on. They are waving their little pennants and yelling, "Go Craig! Go Craig!"

There is, of course, no real hope for me, but they wisely keep this to themselves. Even the bottle of Caraway Seeds is full of hope and encouragement, if no actual flavor.

I grab the bottle, sprinkle it in the pan, and try like hell not to disappoint them.