Allspice

• pimienta de Jamaica

  Spanish

  Literally "Jamaica pepper". It is a single berry, not the mixture of several spices the English name suggests.

• bahar hulw

  Arabic

• piment de la Jamaïque

  French

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.

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.

Matt red-brown berries, slightly larger than a peppercorn, with a rough surface. Ground allspice is a warm mid-brown.

Hard, brittle berries that crack rather than crush, with loose seeds inside. They grind reasonably well and are also used whole in liquids and removed.

• Eugenol — The dominant compound and the clove character. Typically the majority of the volatile oil.
• Methyl eugenol — A related note contributing warmth and depth.
• β-Caryophyllene — The woody, faintly peppery background.
• 1,8-Cineole — A light eucalyptus lift at the top of the aroma.

Use whole where the dish has liquid: berries go into a pickling liquor, a brine or a braise and are strained out. Crack them with the flat of a knife first to open the shell. Grind fresh where a recipe wants ground allspice, and grind only what you need — the complexity is the first thing to go. In jerk, the berry is part of the answer and the wood and leaves are the rest, which is why jerk made anywhere else is a different dish rather than a worse one.

Unusually double-natured. In the Caribbean it is a savoury backbone — the defining spice of jerk, and used in soups, stews and pickles. In northern Europe and North America it is mostly a sweet and preserving spice: pickling liquors, brines, cured meats, mixed spice, cakes and puddings. It works with pork and beef, with oily fish in a cure, with root vegetables and squash, with tomato, with dark sugars and rum, and with fruit. Because it is milder and broader than clove, it can be the lead warm spice in a dish rather than only an accent.

• grinding — Grinds more easily than clove and less easily than pepper. Ground allspice loses its lighter top notes within months, leaving the heavier clove-like part behind.
• toasting — Brief dry heat lifts the aroma. As with clove, the oil content means it scorches faster than a seed spice.
• infusing — Whole berries in a pickling liquor, brine or braise give up their aroma steadily and can be strained out — the standard use in European and Caribbean cooking alike.
• baking — Holds up well to baking, which is why ground allspice appears in cakes, biscuits and puddings across northern Europe and North America.

Crack a berry with the flat of a knife and smell. Fresh allspice is immediately warm and complex — you can pick out clove and cinnamon separately. Old allspice smells of one thing, faintly. For the ground spice, rub a pinch: if it reads as weak clove and nothing else, the complexity has gone.

• A single flat note where there were several
• Berries that crumble dry rather than cracking
• Greyish, dusty appearance
• Caking in the ground spice

• Volatilisation of the lighter aromatics, which costs the complexity first
• Oxidation of the oil to flat, resinous notes
• Moisture uptake and caking in the ground form

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.

• Whole berries that rattle when shaken — the traditional sign they are properly dried.
• Uniform matt red-brown colour with little stalk or dust.
• A complex warm aroma when a berry is cracked, not a single clove note.
• A stated origin, since Jamaican allspice is genuinely more aromatic than Central American.

Graded on berry size, colour and volatile oil content, with origin functioning as a quality signal in the trade: Jamaican allspice commands a premium for aroma, while Central American berries are typically larger and less aromatic.

Myrtaceae

An evergreen tree of the Caribbean and Central America, reaching some 10 metres, with aromatic leaves that are themselves used in cooking. It is dioecious — male and female trees are separate — so a plantation needs both, which complicates cultivation in a way most spice crops do not.

The Greater Antilles and Central America, with Jamaica the historic and still the most reputed source.

• Jamaica — origin. The benchmark origin, and the reason the spice is called Jamaica pepper. Jamaican allspice is generally regarded in the trade as the most aromatic.
• Mexico — major producer
• Honduras — notable producer
• Guatemala — notable producer

Berries are picked green and unripe, which is the whole craft. The aromatic oil is at its peak before ripening; a berry left to ripen turns purple-black, sweet and fleshy, and loses most of what makes it a spice. Small branches are usually cut and the berries stripped from them.

1. Picking green — Unripe green berries are picked, often by cutting small branches.Why: Captures the berry at maximum volatile oil, before ripening dissipates it.
2. Sweating — Berries are commonly heaped for a few days before drying in some producing areas.Why: Associated with colour development in the dried berry.
3. Sun drying — Dried over roughly a week until the berries turn matt red-brown and rattle.Why: Reduces moisture and fixes the aroma in a hard shell.
4. Cleaning and grading — Winnowed and graded on size, colour and freedom from stalk and immature berries.

Graded on berry size, colour uniformity and volatile oil, with Jamaican origin carrying a premium for aroma. The trade distinguishes Jamaican from Central American allspice, which is generally larger-berried and less aromatic.

Whole berries are hard to falsify and cheap enough that there is limited incentive. Ground allspice is the vulnerable form, where spent material from oil extraction, stalk and other ground spices can be blended in without being visible.

Grown in semi-wild groves as much as in formal plantations, with trees often left where birds have spread the seed. Because the species is dioecious and only female trees fruit, a grove has to carry unproductive males, and seedlings cannot be sexed until they flower.

Humid tropical lowlands, largely on limestone soils in the Jamaican case. Attempts to establish the tree commercially outside the Americas have repeatedly disappointed, which is unusual — most tropical spices transplanted readily once the monopolies broke.

Allspice was in use in the Caribbean and Central America long before European contact, and was among the first New World spices carried back to Europe. Its European name records a mistake: Spanish sailors seeking pepper took it for a kind of pepper and called it pimienta, which survives in "pimento" and in the Spanish name for the tree.

Allspice is the significant spice that resisted transplantation. Cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon were all eventually established far from their origins once the monopolies broke; repeated attempts to grow allspice commercially elsewhere disappointed, and Jamaica and Central America remain the sources. That is a genuine peculiarity rather than an accident of history, and it is why "Jamaica pepper" still means something commercially.