vue - Sri Lanka,ශ්‍රී ලංකා,Ceylon,Pepper

My amateurish Explanations about Pepper done right beside the Plants growing in the jungle somewhere in the South Eastern region of Sri Lanka.About Pepper: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 fruit, known as a peppercorn when dried, is approximately 5 millimetres (0.20 in) in diameter, dark red when fully mature, and, like all drupes, contains a single seed. Peppercorns, and the powdered pepper derived from grinding them, may be described simply as pepper, or more precisely as black pepper, white pepper, or green pepper. Green peppercorns are simply the immature black peppercorns. Black peppers are native to India and are extensively cultivated there and elsewhere in tropical regions. Currently Vietnam is by far the world's largest producer and exporter of pepper, producing 34% of the world's Piper nigrum crop as of 2008,Dried ground pepper has been used since antiquity for both its flavor and as a medicine. Black pepper is the world's most traded spice. It is one of the most common spices added to European cuisine and its descendants. The spiciness of black pepper is due to the chemical piperine. It may be found on nearly every dinner table in the industrialized world, often alongside table salt.The word "pepper" is ultimately derived from the Tamil/Malayalam word for long pepper, pippali. Black pepper is marica. Ancient Greek and Latin borrowed pippali to refer to either via the Latin piper which was used by the Romans to refer both to pepper and long pepper, as the Romans erroneously believed that both of these spices were derived from the same plant.The English word for pepper is derived from the 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.[5] In Nepal it is known as Marich (मरिच).Black pepper is produced from the still-green unripe drupes of the pepper plant. The drupes are cooked briefly in hot water, both to clean them and to prepare them for drying. The heat ruptures cell walls in the pepper, speeding the work of browning enzymes during drying. The drupes are dried in the sun or by machine for several days, during which the pepper around the seed shrinks and darkens into a thin, wrinkled black layer. Once dried, the spice is called black peppercorn. On some estates, the berries are separated from the stem by foot and then sun dried without the boiling process.Once the Pepper corns are dried, pepper spirit & oil can be extracted from the berries by crushing it. Pepper spirit is used in famous beverages like Coca-Cola and many other medicinal or beauty products. Pepper oil is also used as an ayurvedic massage oil or used in beauty and herbal treatments.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 fruits from Malabar plants grown on Mount Tellicherry.Sarawak pepper is produced in the Malaysian portion of Borneo.Lampung pepper on Indonesia's island of Sumatra. White Muntok pepper is another Indonesian product. Vietnam peppers are white and black pepper and come from Ba Ria - Vung Tau, Chu Se and Binh Phuoc.The pepper plant is a perennial woody vine growing to four metres in height on supporting trees, poles, or trellises. It is a spreading vine, rooting readily where trailing stems touch the ground. The 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.The fruit of the black pepper is called a drupe and when dried it is a peppercorn.(wikipedia)