In the last couple of years vast areas of bamboo forest have flowered and died in Kerala’s Wayanad district and also in Coorg. Early in 2011, I got to see some of these once vigorous thickets of bamboo in a whole different avatar – leafless, and heavy with pale, straw coloured blossom catching the slightest breeze. A few months later, the bamboo clumps had withered and collapsed upon themselves, the skeletal remains covered in robes of morning glory.

In cultures around the world, the occurrence of mass flowering and dying of bamboo is generally viewed as a portent of doom- of famine or worse to follow. Well, for the people of North East India, particularly Manipur and Mizoram, they might be justified in their unease. The PBS film, Catching Rats,  documented in grisly detail, the phenomenon of an exploding rat population, feeding off the abundant bamboo seed and then subsequently overrunning the rice and other crops of people living in that area. Fortunately, this hasn’t been the case in Coorg, though I wonder if it has perhaps occurred in the past, when there was much more area covered by bamboo forest.

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Vancouver’s markets have a way of constantly springing delightful surprises on me. Sometimes it’s the unfamiliar that draws me, other times it’s the unexpected encounter with something so much a part of another world I inhabit, that it just has to be invited home for a meal. Like those fresh green peppercorns, the other day. I have seen them before in specialist food stores, but this time around, I was dazzled by the unusual abundance of those green beaded twists on the store shelf. Of course I bought far more than I needed for simply tossing into soups and salads – time to get busy!

The pretty, climbing pepper vine, clinging to shade giving trees, is a common sight on any Coorg coffee estate or homestead. Enter a provisions “store room” and the sharp aroma of dried black pepper rises through the muddle of rice, cardamom and coffee. Pepper is known as “nalla malu” or “good pepper” in the Coorg language. And how aptly named it is! This wonderful spice more than lives up to its name, be it in the kitchen or the medicine cabinet.

We have come to rely, in so much of our cooking, on the heat and flavour provided by chillis, that it’s hard to think of a time before the New World imports, those “parangi malu”* or “foreign peppers” weren’t on hand. Yet, there was a time when pepper was the spice that launched a thousand and more ships, all searching for this spice of life! For a fascinating and informative account of the history of the pepper trade, read this article by food writer and culinary historian, Ammini Ramachandran, whose home state of Kerala is at the heart of the “pepper trail“.

Now, back to the kitchen!

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