Grains of Selim

• uda

  Igbo

• hwentia

  Twi — Ghana

• djar

  Wolof — Senegal

• etso

  Ewe

• eeru

  Yoruba

Musky, resinous and bitter, with the pungency concentrated in the seeds rather than the pod. The pod carries the aroma and the seed carries the bite, which is why some preparations use whole pods and remove them and others crush the lot.

Resinous and musky, with eucalyptus and a bitter woody edge — sources describing it reach for cubeb and nutmeg together, with resin over the top. It is markedly more medicinal than black pepper.

Dark brown to near black, twisted and knobbly, with paler seeds inside.

Hard and woody. The pods are lightly crushed rather than ground, and are usually retrieved from the pot.

• β-Pinene and other monoterpenes — The resinous, coniferous character that dominates the aroma.
• 1,8-Cineole — The eucalyptus note, shared with bay, cardamom and rosemary.(what 1,8-cineole is)
• Sesquiterpenes — The heavier musky background that gives the spice its nutmeg-adjacent quality.

Crush the pods lightly — enough to crack them, not enough to powder them — and tie them in a piece of muslin or simply fish them out at the end. That is the technique across West Africa and it exists because the pod is where the aroma is and the wood is where the bitterness is. Toast them briefly first if you want the resin to come forward. And do not grind them for a soup: the ground spice is a different and much more bitter ingredient, appropriate to coffee and to dry mixtures and not to a broth.

A soup and stew spice across West Africa, used whole in pepper soup and light soups and removed before serving, and ground into coffee in Senegal as café Touba. It suits long-cooked broths, goat and fish, and it is used alongside other West African aromatics rather than alone.

• infusing — The characteristic use. Lightly crushed pods tied in a bundle and simmered in a soup or stew, then removed — the same logic as a bouquet garni, and for the same reason: the pods are woody and inedible.
• toasting — Dry-toasted before crushing, which is standard in several West African preparations and lifts the resinous character.
• grinding — Ground whole — pod and seed — for coffee and for some seasoning mixtures, where the bitterness is part of the intention.
• boiling — Holds up through a long simmer, which is where most of it goes.

Crush a pod and smell. Fresh grains of Selim are resinous and eucalyptus-like immediately; an old pod smells of sawdust and will contribute bitterness without aroma.

• No resinous smell on crushing
• Pods crumbling rather than cracking
• A dusty sawdust smell

• Volatilisation of the terpene fraction, especially once ground
• Oxidation towards a flat woody bitterness

Whole, decisively. This is one of the clearest whole-versus-ground cases in the catalogue, and the reason is not shelf life but what gets into the dish: the aromatic fraction is in the pod wall and the bitterness is in the wood, and the traditional technique of crushing lightly, bundling and removing extracts the first while leaving the second behind. Ground grains of Selim puts both in, which is right for coffee and wrong for a soup.

• Whole intact pods rather than broken fragments.
• A resinous smell when a pod is crushed.
• Bought from a West African grocer, where it is ordinary and inexpensive.
• Whole rather than ground, since grinding forces the bitter pod into the dish.

Annonaceae

A tall slim evergreen tree reaching 15 to 30 metres and 60 to 70 cm in diameter, native to the savanna belt of tropical Africa from Senegal east to Ethiopia and south to Tanzania. The fruit is a cluster of narrow twisted pods a few centimetres long.

The savanna and forest-margin belt of tropical Africa, with the species distributed from Senegal to Ethiopia and south into Tanzania.

• Ghana — major producer
• Nigeria — major producer
• Senegal — notable producer. Where it defines café Touba, the dominant style of coffee in the country.
• Cameroon — notable producer
• Ethiopia — notable producer

Fruit clusters picked when mature and dried whole in the sun, which turns them dark brown and hard.

1. Picking — Mature fruit clusters gathered from wild and farm-margin trees.
2. Sun drying — Pods dried whole until dark and hard.
3. Sorting — Broken and immature pods separated out.

Largely gathered rather than farmed. The tree is long-lived and is often retained when land is cleared, which is a common pattern for African forest spices.

Tropical savanna and forest margin. The tree is not cultivated at plantation scale and most supply is gathered from wild and farm-margin trees.

This spice has a longer European trade history than its present obscurity suggests. It reached the Mediterranean through trans-Saharan routes and was sold in medieval and early modern Europe as Ethiopian pepper, Guinea pepper and — in an ugly name that survived far too long — negro pepper, competing with black pepper before the Portuguese sea route to India made that competition unwinnable. It then disappeared from European use almost entirely while remaining ordinary across West Africa.

A substantial regional trade within West Africa and a negligible international one. It is one of several African spices whose displacement from European markets by the Indian Ocean trade was commercial rather than culinary.

A substantial medicinal record across West Africa, and the association with postnatal care in Nigerian practice is a medicinal one as much as a culinary one. Recorded as tradition; SpiceHQ makes no health claim.