Ingredients · Spice

Allspice

Pimenta dioica · Myrtaceae (myrtle family)

Allspice
One berry that tastes like three spices — cinnamon, nutmeg and clove at once, with a peppery, woody edge. The English were calling it allspice by 1621 for exactly that reason, and it confuses people to this day: it is a single dried berry, not a mixture. Fourteen products here carry it, and it is the spice that makes a pumpkin pie blend taste like a pumpkin pie blend and a jerk taste like jerk.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partBerry
KindSpice
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromJamaica
TasteWarm clove, cinnamon and nutmeg at once, with a peppery, woody edge

How to use it

Ground into pumpkin pie, gingerbread, spice cake and mulled wine. Whole in a pickling brine, a Nordic stew, a pot of beans or a braise. The backbone of jerk seasoning, with scotch bonnet and thyme. In Cincinnati chili, in Levantine stews and tomato sauces, and in Swedish meatballs. Poland calls it ziele angielskie, English herb, after Britain's part in its export.

With food

Pork and chicken. Pumpkin, squash and sweet potato. Apple and pear. Tomato. Beef stew. Cabbage and pickled herring. Rum. Chocolate.

With spices

Cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, which it half contains. Thyme and scotch bonnet for jerk. Black pepper and bay for a brine. Ginger and molasses.

With tea

Masala chai. Lapsang Souchong, for the smoke. Assam.

Its story

Where it comes from

Native to the Greater Antilles, southern Mexico and Central America. Jamaica remains the leading commercial source, and by the eighteenth century it was the world's main one. The trees grow in the hill country in what are called pimento walks — wild or semi-wild stands rather than sugar-style plantations. Shop notes name no lot origin.

What happened

The Taino used pimento berries and pimento wood in cooking long before Europeans arrived, and in 1516 the Spanish chronicler Oviedo described them preparing meat and fish on a barbacoa seasoned with hot peppers and pimento. Jamaica's name comes from Xaymaca, land of wood and water. After the English invasion of 1655, Africans who escaped slavery formed free communities in the interior — the Maroons — mixed with the remaining Taino and took up their jerking; by the late eighteenth century they hunted wild hogs, seasoned them with herbs and allspice and cooked them slowly over pimento wood in covered pits. The story goes that the pits also kept the smoke from giving away their camps. Jamaica registered Jamaica Jerk as a geographical indication in 2015, the first English-speaking Caribbean country to register one. Growers long guarded the tree against export, and attempts to grow it elsewhere failed until someone worked out that the seeds germinate after passing through a bird's gut.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

Every ingredient in the shop

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Other ways in

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