Cubeb vs Allspice
The short answer
Confused because both are small brown berries with a complex warm aroma, and unrelated: cubeb is a Piper and allspice is a myrtle relative. Allspice tastes of clove, cinnamon and nutmeg at once because it carries eugenol, and it is sweet-leaning. Cubeb is bitter, resinous and pine-like with real pepper heat. A Jamaican dish made with cubeb is bitter and hot where it should be warm and sweet.
Side by side
| Cubeb | Allspice | |
|---|---|---|
| Botanical identity | Piper cubeba L.f. | Pimenta dioica (L.) Merr. |
| Part used | berry | berry, fruit |
| Origin | Java and Sumatra, and the species is essentially endemic to the Indonesian archipelago as a crop. Almost every historical reference to cubeb in Europe traces back to Javanese production. | The Greater Antilles and Central America, with Jamaica the historic and still the most reputed source. |
| Flavour notes | bitter, peppery, cooling, resinous, faintly medicinal | warm, sweet, clove-like, cinnamon, peppery, woody |
| Heat | Scoville does not apply | Scoville does not apply |
| Flavour | Mildly pungent, distinctly bitter, and finishing cool and slightly medicinal. The bitterness is the defining characteristic and the reason cubeb is used in small amounts within blends rather than as a table spice; the cooling finish is the reason it works in gin. | Sweet, warm and gently pungent, reading as clove first, then cinnamon, then a faint pepperiness. It is milder and rounder than clove and much easier to use in quantity, which is why it can carry a dish where clove can only accent one. |
| Aroma | Peppery at first and then unexpectedly cool — a eucalyptus and pine note over a warm, resinous base, with something of allspice in it. It smells more complicated than black pepper and less appetising to most people on first encounter. | Warm and sweet, clove-dominated with clear cinnamon and a light peppery edge. The impression of several spices at once is genuine rather than suggestible — the oil contains the compounds that dominate each of them. |
Which should you buy?
Cubeb
Whole, and unusually emphatically. Two separate reasons point the same way: the stalk is the only way to confirm the spice is cubeb rather than pepper or allspice sold as cubeb, and the aromatic fraction that makes cubeb interesting is the part that disappears from ground spice while the bitterness stays. Ground cubeb is therefore both unverifiable and, after a few months, simply bitter.
Allspice
Buy whole. Allspice keeps unusually well in the berry, grinds acceptably at home, and is used whole in a great many of its traditional applications — pickling, brining, braising — where it needs to be retrievable. Ground allspice also loses the specific thing that makes it worth having: as the lighter aromatics go, it converges on a flat clove note, and at that point you may as well have used clove.
Full detail on cubeb and allspice, including evidence grades and sources for every claim above.