Cubeb

Cubeb is a vine of the pepper genus, grown mainly on Java and Sumatra for its fruit and for the oil distilled from it. The fruits are picked before they ripen and then dried, and they look much like black peppercorns except that each keeps a short stalk, the reason the spice is also sold as tailed pepper. The wrinkled dried skin ranges from greyish brown to black around a hard, white, oily seed, and the flavour is pungent, bitter and lingering, often compared with allspice. The name came into English from Arabic by way of Old French. Arab trade carried cubeb to Europe through India, and in the Middle Ages it seasoned meat and sauces and was candied whole as a sweet; its use in the kitchen fell away after the king of Portugal banned its sale around 1640 to favour black pepper. Europeans came to think that demons found it repellent, and a seventeenth-century priest writing on exorcism included it in an incense meant to drive away an incubus. From the 1880s it was smoked in medicated cigarettes, and it still flavours at least one gin. In magical practice Cunningham assigns it to Mars and to fire, with the single power of love: the berries are put into love sachets and spells.