Why are salt & pepper most commonly used together as opposed to salt and garlic, or other spices?
In: Culture
When you taste food it is a combination of sensory input from receptor cells in your mouth and nose. The receptors in your nose are able to differentiate a very large amount of different things, this is where the nuanced flavor of food comes from.
The receptors on your tongue and in your mouth are more focused on picking up specific things. Like the receptor for sweet only picks up short chain carbohydrates, the receptor for sour only pings off on the H+ ion from acids.
Salt and pepper are ubiquitous because they are able to ping off those mouth receptors without changing the signals sent by the receptors in your nose. To make it simpler they make things taste better without changing them. MSG works in the same way, it pings off the glutamate receptors in your mouth without hitting the receptors in your nose. On a side note amount matters, black pepper very much does have a flavor but the amount of pepper needed to enhance food is below the amount needed to add a pepper flavor.
One of the tricks used by professional chefs to make their food taste better is to season with more than just salt and pepper. Vinegar or lemon juice (sour), sugar (sweet) and parsley (bitter) are all used along with other things to make food taste better without adding additional flavors.
There is no reason that black pepper has to be used, capsicum peppers (chilis) can serve the same purpose. The reason black pepper is more common has to do with availability. Before Columbus chili peppers were only a new world plant. Black pepper originated in southwest asia and was traded the world over and was pretty thoroughly entrenched in european cooking by the time chilis came into availability.
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