allspice
Cultural layer
Jamaica Agricultural Commodities Regulatory Authority (JACRA), regulation of pimento and spices (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining, Jamaica, accessed 2026-09-13)
The Oxford Companion to Food (Alan Davidson, 1999)
Pimenta dioica (L.) Merr. (Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, accessed 2026-10-11)
Jerk: Barbecue from Jamaica (Helen Willinsky, 1990)
About Spices, Spices Division (Jamaica Agricultural Commodities Regulatory Authority, accessed 2026-10-16)
Known Industry Concerns, Spices Division (Jamaica Agricultural Commodities Regulatory Authority, accessed 2026-10-16)
The Competitiveness Company and Technological Solutions Limited for ACDI/VOCA, Value Chain and End Market Analysis of Ginger, Turmeric and Pimento in Jamaica, USDA Food for Progress Jamaica Spices (JaSPICE) project, compendium of deliverables (17 July 2024, published by JACRA)
Guido B. Marcelle, Production, Handling and Processing of Nutmeg and Mace and their Culinary Uses (FAO Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean, 1995)
Jerk: Barbecue from Jamaica (Helen Willinsky, 1990)
Provisions: The Roots of Caribbean Cooking, 150 Vegetarian Recipes (Michelle and Suzanne Rousseau, 2018)
Route
PendingThe routes are written. They are not yet mapped.
This entry's cultural layer already names where it came from and how it moved. What it does not yet carry is that movement as structure: ordered waypoints with real coordinates, and a mechanism on each leg. Until it does, the layer stays an empty slot rather than a drawn line, because a map built from prose would be a guess with a projection under it.
1 of 409 entries carries a mapped route · nutmeg is the prototype
- Waypoints
Ordered places, each with its kind
- Coordinates
Real positions, with the gazetteer they came from
- Segments
From, to, and the mechanism that moved it
- Confidence
Documented, attributed or contested
- Summary
What the route argues, in a sentence
Rite
Pimento wood is the fuel and the spice at once in a Jamaican jerk pit, and the method was developed by Maroons cooking where the smoke could not give them away. That constraint produced the whole technique. Jamaica supplies most of the world's allspice because attempts to establish the tree elsewhere kept failing. A spice that refused transplanting stayed with the people who worked out what to do with it.
Provisions: The Roots of Caribbean Cooking, 150 Vegetarian Recipes (Michelle and Suzanne Rousseau, 2018)
Names · co-equal, marked by how each one travelled
FoodwayPresent as a living food culture.
No names recorded.
Connections
9 bonds · 9 sourcedJerk pork, the pimento ground into the marinade.
Searched in Jerk: Barbecue from Jamaica, 1990, page 26, pork loin on the grill, and page 34, jerked roasted suckling pig, each under a jerk paste with ground Jamaican pimento; pages 24 and 25, the jerk pork of Boston.
Set in bold capitals in The Flavor Bible: very highly recommended by a large number of the chefs it surveyed.
Read from the entry for allspice in the 2008 edition.
The jerk pair, ground pimento against the pepper.
Searched in Jerk: Barbecue from Jamaica, 1990, page 14, the jerk rub, ground pimento with four to six hot peppers finely ground; pages 19 and 20, the hot pepper is the Scotch bonnet, whose sauce heats the rub and marinade.
Jerk chicken.
Searched in Jerk: Barbecue from Jamaica, 1990, page 43, authentic Jamaican jerk chicken, in the jerk marinade of page 15 with its ground pimento, grilled over coals and pimento wood.
The jerk marinade base, with the pimento ground into it.
Searched in Jerk: Barbecue from Jamaica, 1990, page 15, the jerk marinade, thyme and ground pimento with onion, scallion, hot pepper, soy sauce and vinegar; page 14, the rub, the same without the liquids.
Score unexamined
Set in plain type in The Flavor Bible: suggested by one or more of the chefs it surveyed.
Read from the entry for allspice in the 2008 edition.
Set in plain type in The Flavor Bible: suggested by one or more of the chefs it surveyed.
Read from the entry for allspice in the 2008 edition.
Set in plain type in The Flavor Bible: suggested by one or more of the chefs it surveyed.
Read from the entry for allspice in the 2008 edition.
Bonds are drawn from culinary literature and origin-tradition references, tiered by source. Origin means a reference from the place. Witness means the pairing is the place's own and the reference documenting it was written from outside.
The score is cultural weight: how central a pairing is in the tradition that documents it. It is not a prediction of how two materials behave in a formulation and not a measure of chemical affinity. The scale is ordinal, because centrality is a judgement rather than a measurement: 1.0 where the pair is the dish, 0.9 a fixed named form, 0.8 a canonical dish, 0.7 recurrent across many dishes, 0.6 common, 0.5 attested, 0.4 marginal or compound-led.
Each score is set against a named dish and carries that dish in its note. Where a score has not been examined it says so, because an inherited figure and a researched one should not look alike.
The dish is named by a reader who knows the cuisine and cites a source appropriate to it. It has not yet been confirmed inside that source page by page, so a note records what supports a score rather than what has been checked in the book.
Studio Culinar-E, "allspice", Pantry Archive, Studio Monk-E, 2026. https://studioculinar-e.com/archive/allspice
/archive/allspice
Bonds are tiered by source, origin-tradition references first.