Long Pepper: Flavor, Piperine, History and How It Is Used

Long pepper tastes like black pepper with more going on: sweeter, a little less hot, and with a citrusy edge. It’s the dried fruiting spike of Piper longum, a climbing relative of the black pepper vine. Rome prized it, medieval Europe spiced its wine with it, and after chiles arrived from the Americas it all but vanished from European kitchens. In India, where it’s called pippali, it never went away.

At a glance

What long pepper is

Piper longum is a climbing perennial or subshrub in the pepper family. The spice is its whole fruiting spike: fleshy and greenish to reddish-brown when mature, roughly 2 cm long.

Another species gets sold under the same name. Javanese long pepper, Piper retrofractum, is a separate accepted species. Kew gives it as native to the Philippines and introduced across mainland Southeast Asia, Malaya and the Lesser Sunda Islands.²

Flavor and aroma

People who cook with long pepper describe it the same way. Atlas Obscura’s food entry calls it like black pepper but more complex, sweeter and not as hot, with a citrusy bite it compares to Sichuan peppercorns.³ A 2025 Atlas Obscura guide to peppers also calls it more complex than black pepper, with a similar zing.⁴ When several spices are competing in a dish, the difference from black pepper is easy to lose. On its own, that sweeter, rounder warmth comes through.

The compounds

• Piperine is the main alkaloid and carries the bite. A 2026 review puts it at about 3–5% of the fruit’s dry weight.¹ It’s the same compound that makes black pepper hot; PROSEA gives 4.9–7.7% for black pepper.⁵ Those figures come from different sources and samples. They’re in the same ballpark, but they aren’t a head-to-head measurement.
• How piperine works. In a lab study on human heat receptors grown in cultured cells, piperine switched on TRPV1, the receptor capsaicin also acts on, though it was much less potent than capsaicin.⁶ That’s a cell study, not a taste test.
• Aroma. The volatile oil is a small slice of the fruit, about 1%. Its major constituents include β-caryophyllene, bisabolene, pentadecane, zingiberene and α-zingiberene, per the same review.¹

Origin and history

Where it grows

Kew’s Plants of the World Online gives the native range as the eastern Himalaya to southern Yunnan and Indo-China. Its native regions include Assam, Bangladesh, the eastern Himalaya, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and the Nicobar Islands, and it was introduced to peninsular India and Sri Lanka. (Kew counts Assam and the eastern Himalaya as regions separate from the rest of India.) James Hancock, writing for World History Encyclopedia, says long pepper was domesticated in northeastern India.⁷ The review cited above says much of the long pepper traded in India is wild-harvested from forests, with the harvest peaking from April to June.¹

India

In Sanskrit long pepper is pippali, and it goes into classical Ayurvedic formulations such as Trikatu and Chyawanprash. Atlas Obscura’s pepper guide traces the English word pepper, through Latin, back to pippali.⁴

Greece and Rome

Atlas Obscura’s food entry calls long pepper a popular spice in ancient Greece and Rome.³ Hancock goes further: he calls it the most popular pepper in Rome and credits its greater pungency.⁷ Roman elites imported it from India as a luxury for spiced dishes and drinks. Roman ships made regular runs across the Arabian Sea to India’s Malabar coast for pepper in general.

You’ll often read that long pepper cost three times as much as black pepper in Rome, and that Pliny the Elder recorded the prices. We couldn’t open Pliny’s text, so we’re leaving that figure out.

Medieval Europe and the decline

Atlas Obscura says long pepper spread through Europe as a cooking spice and went into hippocras, a mulled medicinal wine, until the 1500s. It also says the plant was hard to grow outside its native region, which kept the price high, and that after Columbus brought allspice and chiles back from the Americas, long pepper nearly disappeared from European cooking.³ Coletti adds that Europeans once loved it enough to lend its name to other hot spices, eventually including unrelated plants like chiles.⁴

You may also see lists of the spices in specific medieval French court kitchens, or the claim that grains of paradise helped push long pepper aside. We couldn’t trace either to a source.

How long pepper is used

• India. Atlas Obscura’s food entry names rasam (a sour South Indian soup), lentil curries and Indian pickles, and calls long pepper essential to the mutton stew nihari.³ Coletti has used it in rasam and in recreations of Roman recipes.⁴
• North Africa. PepperScale lists long pepper as an optional ingredient in the Moroccan blend ras el hanout, where black pepper is the usual one.⁸ See ras el hanout.
• Anywhere black pepper goes. Use it in place of black pepper in rubs, dressings, slaws and braises. Grind or grate it as you need it.
• Whole. Drop a whole spike into a braise, stock or pickle and fish it out later, the way you would a cinnamon stick.

Buying and quality

You can buy long pepper whole or ground. South Asian grocery stores carry it, and it’s hard to find in much of the West. Since two species share the name, a label with the botanical name (Piper longum or Piper retrofractum) tells you more than one without. We didn’t find an international grade standard for long pepper.

Storage

No regulator or standards body gives a shelf life for long pepper, and we didn’t find a published figure. Like other whole spices, it keeps its smell longest whole, sealed and away from heat and light, so grind it as you need it. If it smells faint when you crack it, it’s faded.

Safety and health

We didn’t find any regulator advisory on long pepper as a culinary spice.

The health research is mostly lab and animal work. The 2026 review that collects it calls for more clinical trials to establish efficacy and safety, and advises caution at excessive intakes. It also reports that piperine inhibits drug-metabolizing enzymes such as CYP3A4 and the transporter P-glycoprotein.¹ We’re not claiming long pepper treats or prevents any disease. If you take prescription medicines and you’re thinking about a long pepper or piperine supplement, ask a pharmacist or doctor first.

Substitutes and comparisons

Black pepper is the obvious stand-in, with a sharper, more one-note heat. See long pepper vs. black pepper for the side-by-side and long pepper substitutes for the ranked list. No source we found gives a tested swap ratio. For other peppery spices from different plants, try cubeb pepper, grains of paradise and Sichuan pepper. See also our black pepper profile, and too much pepper if a dish has gone over.