Allspice

The dried unripe berry of Pimenta dioica, a Caribbean myrtle. One spice that tastes like three — clove, cinnamon and nutmeg at once — which is where the name comes from, and why it is not a blend however much it sounds like one.

What it is

Allspice is the dried unripe berry of Pimenta dioica, an evergreen in the myrtle family native to the Greater Antilles and Central America. The berries are picked green, sun-dried until they turn a matte reddish-brown, and sold whole or ground.

🔴 The single most common misunderstanding: allspice is not a mixture. It is one berry from one tree. The name is a seventeenth-century English description of its flavour, which genuinely does read as clove, cinnamon and nutmeg arriving together, with a peppery edge behind them. Anyone who has assumed the jar contains a blend — and plenty of people do — is misreading a very old piece of marketing.

The clove note is not a coincidence: the dominant aroma compound is eugenol, the same one that dominates clove. That shared chemistry is why clove is the least-bad single substitute and why the two can crowd each other in a dish.

It is also called pimento (from Spanish pimienta, pepper — the Spanish took the dried berries for a kind of peppercorn), and Jamaica pepper. ⚠ Do not confuse “pimento” here with the sweet red pimiento pepper in a jar of pimiento cheese or stuffed into an olive; entirely unrelated, and the near-identical spelling has caused real recipe accidents.

History & origin

Allspice is one of the few important spices native to the New World, and one of very few that has resisted successful cultivation anywhere else. Columbus encountered it in the Caribbean while looking for black pepper and it went back to Europe under a pepper’s name, which is how the confusion started.

Jamaica has been the centre of the trade for centuries, and the reason is stubbornly agricultural: the tree is dioecious, slow, and repeated attempts to establish plantations elsewhere have produced disappointing crops. Jamaican allspice is still generally regarded as the best.

Its other historical role is preservation — allspice was used in barrel-curing meat and fish on long voyages, and there are accounts of the wood and leaves being used for smoking, which is exactly what jerk cooking still does.

Where it comes from today

Jamaica dominates, with Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala also producing. Most of what reaches a supermarket is ground; whole berries are easy to find and much better, because ground allspice fades fast.

How it’s used today

Allspice sits in two quite different traditions at once, which is part of what makes it interesting:

• The Caribbean, savoury. It is the backbone of Jamaican jerk, and it turns up in a great many Caribbean curry powders — a real point of difference from an Indian blend, which will not usually contain it. It goes into stews, escovitch, and pickling brines.
• Northern Europe and North America, sweet and preserving. Pickling spice, mulling spice, gingerbread, mincemeat, sausage-making, Christmas baking, and Scandinavian and German cured and potted meats. Whole berries go into brines, braises and pickling liquid where they can be fished out; ground goes into doughs, rubs and blends. It is potent — it is easy to make a dish taste like a Christmas candle by being generous with it.

Make your own

There is nothing to make: it is a single dried berry. The useful version of “make your own” here is grind your own — whole allspice berries keep their aroma for a couple of years, where the ground powder is noticeably tired within months. A few seconds in a spice grinder, or a coarse crack in a mortar for a brine, and the difference is obvious.

If you want the thing allspice is most famously part of, that is a jerk seasoning: allspice with scotch bonnet, thyme, scallion, garlic, ginger, and brown sugar — the allspice and the thyme are the two you cannot leave out.

Substitutes (if absolutely necessary)

• The closest single spice is clove, at about half to two-thirds the quantity — they share eugenol, but clove is far more assertive and will run away with a dish.
• A workable mix: roughly equal parts cinnamon and nutmeg with about half as much clove. Ratios vary between sources and none of them is authoritative; taste it.
• Pumpkin-pie spice works in sweet baking at a pinch, but it carries ginger, which allspice does not.
• 🔴 Nothing substitutes for it in jerk. In that one application allspice is not a background note, it is the dish, and a blend standing in for it is noticeably wrong.
• ⚠ Not a substitute for, or substitutable with, pimiento peppers — see the naming note above.

Where to find it

Every supermarket spice aisle carries it ground; whole berries are usually there too and are the better buy. Caribbean and West Indian grocers sell it in bags, often Jamaican, cheaper and fresher, and are also where to find the allspice wood or leaves occasionally sold for smoking.

Buy whole. Ground allspice is one of the faster-fading ground spices — if the jar in the back of the cupboard smells more of dust than of clove, it has nothing left to give.