Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Spice guide to Cubeb Pepper along with all the Cubeb Pepper containing recipes presented on this site, with 11 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the Cornish recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain as a major flavouring.

Cubeb pepper (also known as tailed pepper or Java pepper), Piper cubeba, is a member of the genus Piper that also includes black pepper, long pepper, kava, Japanese pepper and Mexican pepper. As such it is a member of the Piperaceae (pepper) family of flowering plants. Piper cubeba is mostly grown in Java and Sumatra and like the other members of the genus it is a flowering vine whose main hiabitat is the understory of lowland rainforests. The fruit of this vine are gathered before they are ripe and then they are carefully dried. Commercial cubebs consist of the dried berries, similar in appearance to black pepper, but with stalks attached — the 'tails' of the 'tailed pepper'. The odour of cubebs is described as agreeable and aromatic and its taste is generally described as pungent, acrid, slightly bitter and persistent. Indeed, like so many other spices it's the bitter overtones cubeb pepper that meant it never truly became a competitor for black pepper.

Whilst it never gained any real foothold in the European spice trade (probably due to its bitter overtones) Cubeb pepper remains a crucial ingredient of authentic Indonesian foods. However, it does seem that Cubeb pepper was known and appreciated during the Medieval period, as the recipe for Sauce Sarcenes demonstrates. In Moroccan cuisine, cubeb is used in savory dishes and in pastries like markouts — little diamonds of semolina with honey and dates. Cubeb is sometimes included in the list of ingredients for the famed spice mixture Ras el hanout. In West Africa, cubeb turns up in dishes like the stews of Benin, where its use is so frequent it is referred to as piment pays, (Country Pepper). In Indonesian cuisine, especially in Indonesian gulés (curries), cubeb is also used amongst other spices.

Cubeb pepper has a pungent and bitter taste with a strong terpene aroma. The aroma is variously described dry–woody, warm–camphora­ceous and spicy–peppery. The dried fruits contain up to 10% essential oil composed of monoterpenes (sabinene 50%, carene, α-thujene, 1,4-cineol and 1,8-cineol) and sesquiterpenes (copaene, α- and β-cubebene, δ-cadinene, caryophyllene, germacrene, cubebol). The monoterpenes dominate by mass, but the sesquiterpenes are important for the characteristic flavour. The pungency is caused by the lignane cubebin (2%) and several related compounds: hinokinin, clusin, dihydroclusin, dihydrocubebin and more. Amides, which are the pungent principles in black and long pepper, do not play a significant rôle in cubeb pepper.

The plant is native to Indonesia, with most of the commercial harvesting today being performed in Java. Note that it is easily confused with West African Ashanti pepper, the fruit of Piper guineense (also known as false cubeb pepper). Whilst it never gained any real foothold in the European spice trade (probably due to its noticeable bitter overtones) Cubeb pepper remains a crucial ingredient of authentic Indonesian foods. However, it does seem that Cubeb pepper was known and appreciated during the Medieval period, as the recipe for Sauce Sarcenes demonstrates. In Moroccan cuisine, cubeb is used in savory dishes and in pastries like markouts — little diamonds of semolina with honey and dates. Cubeb is sometimes included in the list of ingredients for the famed spice mixture Ras el hanout.

In West Africa, cubeb turns up in dishes like the stews of Benin, where its use is so frequent it is referred to as piment pays, (Country Pepper). In Indonesian cuisine, especially in Indonesian gulés (curries), cubeb is also used amongst other spices.

Cubeb pepper was used as a substitute for black pepper in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries but has been used in European cuisine since the middle ages. The readily availability of black pepper has lead to a precipitous decline in the use of cubeb pepper in Europe. Today, cubebs are mostly used in some North African states, most notably in Tunisia and Morocco.