All About Allspice

So you know that pimento is a red bell pepper, and then one day you find out that in Italian pimento (like the word piment in French) means allspice. How did that happen?

It started in the Middle Ages, when Spanish cooks used so much pepper in cooking that it colored the dishes, and they took to calling pepper pimiento, or pigment. With the discovery of the Caribbean, the Spanish started calling chile peppers pimientos, and then they found another spice growing there, allspice, and called it pimiento too.

Eventually they took to calling black pepper pimienta, red pepper pimiento (or pimienton) and allspice pimiento de Jamaica. French and Spanish unfortunately came aboard before that was sorted out. We can be grateful for having the word allspice, which spares us the whole mess.

The reason we call it allspice is that its scent is said to resemble a mixture of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. (That’s why Lebanese cooks, who used complicated spice mixtures in the Middle Ages, now mostly use allspice.) Probably it smells more like cloves than anything else, because it’s related to cloves, and also to guavas and a lot of obscure tropical fruits with names like grumichama and lilly pilly.

Its closest relative is the West Indian bay, a tree whose leaves are distilled into the old-fashioned men’s cologne called bay rum. Incidentally, in the West Indies, the leaves of that tree are used in cooking, too, for that right-out-of-the-barber-shop flavor.