كبابة

Cubeb — Piper cubeba — is a pepper vine native to Java and Sumatra. The Arabic word kabāba entered Medieval Latin as cubeba and English as cubeb. The berries look like black peppercorns with small tails, earning them the alternative name 'tailed pepper.' The flavor is warm, slightly bitter, and faintly reminiscent of allspice. Medieval European cooks used cubeb interchangeably with black pepper.

Arab traders controlled the cubeb trade from Java through the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. The spice appears in medieval European recipes, medical texts, and spice lists throughout the 1300s and 1400s. It was used in sauces, in medicines, and in the preparation of meats. Guillaume Tirel, the French chef who wrote Le Viandier around 1375, calls for cubeb in multiple recipes. The spice was standard.

In 1640, King John IV of Portugal reportedly banned cubeb imports to protect the Portuguese monopoly on black pepper, which was more profitable. The ban, whether it was a single decree or a gradual trade shift, worked. Within a generation, cubeb had virtually disappeared from European cooking. A spice that had been common for three centuries became an obscurity. No other spice has disappeared from a cuisine so completely and so deliberately.

Cubeb survives in Indonesian cuisine — the berries are still used in Javanese and Balinese cooking — and in Moroccan ras el hanout, where they appear alongside grains of paradise, long pepper, and other medieval spice-trade survivors. The herb and spice shop in a Moroccan medina is the closest thing to a medieval European spice cabinet that still exists.