allspice

Pimenta dioica, the dried unripe berry, never leads a blend here; it always backs something else. A full teaspoon, 1.9 grams, goes into abo shalhoob's cumin-and-yogurt beef, and a pinch, 0.2 to 0.3 grams, is powdered into the fish spice mix and the rice spice mix behind cumin, coriander, cinnamon and cardamom. The tree itself is a recent arrival in this cupboard by any honest account: its native range is southern Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, nowhere in the Old World, so any Levantine blend built on it cannot predate 1492, however old the recipe reads.

The berry's oil is dominated by one molecule almost everywhere it grows: eugenol, measured at 72.6 per cent in the source behind this library's own entity, and reported across growing regions from 64 to 86 per cent, Jamaica highest at 86.4, Guatemala lowest at 65.9. Clove bud oil runs almost as high, at 68 to 82 per cent: the shared eugenol dominance is the real reason allspice reads as clove, cinnamon and pepper folded into one berry, since chemically it sits closer to clove than to any pepper. Beta-caryophyllene trails well behind at 6.13 per cent, a woody, peppery frame under the eugenol rather than a rival to it. Abo shalhoob blooms it dry, with cumin and black pepper, for about a minute before the meat goes back into the pan.