Salt and pepper are the "standard" seasonings for all Western foods, so what's so great about them?

Salt is a seasoning that is important to anyone, in fact it is the first seasoning in everyone's collection, it brings out the other flavors. It gives a core and structure to spices and seasonings and it gives a burst of freshness to fresh vegetables. The human body needs salt, so it makes sense to crave it. Even cultures that use high-salt seasonings, such as soy sauce, adjust their seasonings with pure salt.

In fact Chinese and Western food are the same when it comes to the use of salt. But it is interesting to note that there is another seasoning that is arguably the "standard" seasoning for all Western foods: pepper.

Chinese food prefers peppercorns to peppercorns in Western food, but of course it's not that we don't use peppercorns, it's just that we don't use them with the same fervor as Westerners. So why is that? Here's why.

The truth is that as far as flavor is concerned, unlike salt, pepper is there to add flavor, not to clarify other flavors. It has a strong pungent flavor, not usually as hot as cayenne pepper, but spicy enough to be numbing, a flavor that actually pairs well with cinnamon and cloves.

There's a cracker in Germany called Pepper Nut that although you can't taste the pepper, the pepper helps to accentuate the flavors of cinnamon and nutmeg, which blend into a new, wonderful flavor.

There's a historical reason why salt and pepper is the "standard" seasoning for all Western foods! There are also historical reasons. Of course we can skip the salt in this question, because we have already talked about the importance of salt for people.

Pepper is native to Southeast Asia, and is a favorite condiment in almost every culture. People love its flavor, especially in the early West, and in early Europe it was worth more than gold. The Romans spent multiple dollars just to get pepper from Southeast Asia.

That is to say, though, the Romans at the time already knew of dozens of flavorings. For example, one Roman recipe for roasted wild boar was to be filled with cardamom. Other recipes called for lots of garum, a fermented fish sauce, and fructose, a concentrated grape juice, among many others. But throughout the medieval period, pepper remained one of the many important spices.

That's when an important figure emerged as the driving force behind why pepper became the "standard" seasoning of Western cuisine. The Sun King (Louis XIV) changed things. Although he liked luxury, he preferred simple flavors, and in his court, salt and pepper were the main seasonings, instead of the dozens of spices available to his contemporaries. So people began to imitate him, and other spices ceased to be popular in the West.