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Salt and pepper are stock ingredients, but what can you substitute if someone is allergic to the black stuff?

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What do you give someone who can’t tolerate pepper, which seems to be an essential ingredient in every recipe I read?
Christopher, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Faced as he is with an intolerance to salt’s inseparable sidekick, Christopher is asking what to do when a recipe lists pepper in its ingredients. Mostly, though, he’s asking why recipes pretty much always do this.

As pet peeves go, this is an evergreen among food writers. “We don’t add cumin or paprika to every single dish, so why should we add pepper?” said Emma Christensen on web magazine Kitchn. “Salt needs a new companion,” opined Sara Dinkerman for Slate. “Put the pepper down!” ordered Emma Laperruque last year on Food52.

Read all those pieces, and you’ll find a common theme: salt and pepper might, for historical reasons, be joined at the culinary hip, but that doesn’t mean they have to be. In Salt Fat Acid Heat, Samin Nosrat explains that salt, as a mineral, serves both chemical and gustatory functions (it tenderises meat, draws water out of vegetables, it insulates and ensures even cooking when used to bake fish, enhances flavour), whereas pepper is just a spice. It is only about flavour. The reason it gets to plays centre court on the dinner table is simply that, of all the spices, it got there first. Using it at this point in time is something of a civilisational habit.

So the first step is to realise that you don’t always have to replace it with anything. Or, as chef Asma Khan puts it: “The kick it brings is not always necessary.” Former Bake Off contestant and food writer Chetna Makan agrees: “I’ve got pepper just sitting there. I don’t use much of it. It can easily be skipped in Indian cuisine – it’s not essential.”

Of course, you might just love it. For Jeremy Lee, of London’s Quo Vadis, cooking and eating without pepper is nothing less than tragic. But he is quick to point to several replacements – on the spice rack, the condiment shelf and the produce aisle – that can bring a similar punch. In savoury settings, he’d plump for “a dash of Tabasco, mustard or horseradish spread liberally, or a good-quality peppery leaf such as mustard or rocket.” Makan suggests paprika, for its smokiness, and food writer Jennifer Joyce Sichuan pepper (not, in fact, a type of pepper, but the fragrant bud of the prickly ash tree). Everyone I speak to suggests the obvious: a pinch of dried chilli flakes, preferably a mild on,e such as the Turkish pul biber.

Now, it’s tempting to think that pasta cacio e pepe, say, would be impossible to make without pepper, given that it’s literally there in the name of the dish, but I’d happily eat a bowlful of cheesy pasta with any one of the substitutes listed above (well, maybe not the horseradish). The point is, given that pepper is just about flavour and not necessity, you are free to raid your pantry and try things out until you find another flavour that works.

The same applies to sweet things. Anna Jones pairs black pepper with cherries in a streusel muffin, while the New York Times’ Mark Bittman is famous for a recipe in which he macerates strawberries in balsamic vinegar and black pepper. In both instances, the spice is a highlight, not a default setting, and Lee suggests nutmeg, cinnamon, mace, allspice, even cloves – “a happy thought”, he says. There are so many more spices out there, none of which, Laperruque notes, are all-purpose. Each brings their own unique flavour. Ultimately, being unable to eat pepper is an invitation to free your tastebuds and try stuff out. That is where the magic lies.

• Do you have a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

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