One Berry Pretending To Be Three Spices

Almost every British kitchen has a jar of it. Almost nobody knows what is in it.

Here is the short answer, and it surprises people every time: allspice is not a mixture. It is one thing. One dried berry, from one tree, that happens to taste like three other spices at once.

Where the name came from

The tree is Pimenta dioica. It grows in the Greater Antilles and Central America, and Jamaica has always been the heart of it.

When the Spanish arrived in the Caribbean they were hunting for black pepper, which was the money spice of the age. They found this small brown berry that dried hard and round, looked close enough, and called it pimienta, pepper. That name stuck in Jamaica, where the spice is still called pimento to this day, and where the tree and the wood carry the name too.

The English took longer and were more literal. They tasted it, decided it was somewhere between clove, cinnamon and nutmeg, and called it allspice. A name that describes a flavour rather than a plant, which is why so many people assume it must be a blend on a shelf somewhere.

It is not. It is a berry, picked green, dried in the sun until it goes brown and hard.

What we call it at home

In Guadeloupe and Martinique we call it bois d’Inde. Wood of the Indies.

And here is the part that never makes it into British spice racks: we use the leaves.

The bois d’Inde leaf is a thick, glossy, bay-shaped leaf from the same tree, and in the French Caribbean it is not a substitute for the berry, it is its own ingredient. It goes into court-bouillon. It goes into colombo. It goes into the pot when you are cooking anything that needs to smell like home. Dried, it looks like a big bay leaf. It tastes like nothing else.

If you have ever eaten Guadeloupean food and could not place a flavour, there is a good chance it was a bois d’Inde leaf sitting quietly in the liquid.

You can find the leaves at Caribbean grocers, and increasingly online. If you cannot, a bay leaf plus two crushed allspice berries gets you in the neighbourhood. It is not the same. Nothing is.

What it actually does in a dish

Allspice is a warm spice, but it is not a sweet one. That is the distinction that trips up British cooks, who meet it first in mincemeat or a Christmas cake and file it under pudding.

In the Caribbean it is a savoury backbone. It is the spice that makes jerk taste like jerk, alongside the scotch bonnet and the thyme. It goes into stews, into marinades, into anything slow. It carries fat and it stands up to smoke, which is why it belongs on anything that has been near a fire.

Three things worth knowing if you cook with it:

Buy the berries, not the powder. Ground allspice loses its top notes fast. Whole berries keep for a year or more and you can crush what you need in thirty seconds.

Toast before you crush. A dry pan, a minute, no oil. The difference is not subtle.

Use fewer than you think. It is a strong voice. Six berries will season a pot for six people.

The substitute question

People ask what to use instead, so: a quarter teaspoon of ground cloves, a quarter of cinnamon and a small grating of nutmeg will approximate a teaspoon of ground allspice, and it will be worse. The whole point of the berry is that it delivers all three at once, in balance, without three separate spices fighting.

If you are cooking Caribbean food, do not substitute. Go and buy the berries.

Where it lives in our sauces

Warm spice is the part of Guadeloupean cooking that British palates recognise last. Heat they expect. Herbs they expect. The rounded, woody warmth underneath is the thing that makes people say they cannot place it.

That warmth is what I built Caribbean Sauce Creole around: the base of a Guadeloupean pot, in a jar, so you are not starting from nothing on a Tuesday night. If you want to taste what that warmth does over a long cook, the clearest example is my curry goat, and the most Guadeloupean one is poulet colombo, where the spice blend and the bois d’Inde work together.

One small thing to try this week

Next time you make a stew, any stew, British or otherwise, drop six whole allspice berries into the liquid at the start and take them out at the end.

You will not be able to name what changed. That is rather the point.

JP