If you take a look at search engine analytics, you’ll see that every year thousands of people ask Google what allhand actually is and what it’s made of. To the surprise of many, it is not actually a mixture of several different aromatics and spices, but the ground berries of a tree found in tropical parts of America.
None of this will come as any surprise to connoisseurs of Mexican, Middle Eastern or Caribbean cuisine, so we apologize for stating the obvious to many.
For those less familiar with flavor, allhande is made simply by grinding off the dried berries double-edged peppera tree native to Central America that can happily grow in most warm parts of the planet.
The spice goes by many names, including Jamaica pepper, myrtle pepper or allspice.
Today it is widely used in cuisines around the world, even many European foods from Swedish meatballs to Portuguese stews. In Polish, allspice is called ziele angielskie, translated from the term “English spice”, which is quite strange considering that the British are usually very against tasting their food.
The word allspice is believed to have been developed by early European colonizers arriving in the Americas, who revered the spice for combining the flavors of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves (some of their favorite “Old World” flavors).
In another “how did people not know?” news, it was recently revealed that many people on the internet do not know what paprika is made of. That’s right, there isn’t a paprika bush responsible for spicing up your goulash.