Cubeb Pepper: The Tailed, Bitter Cousin of Black Pepper

Cubeb is the pepper with a tail. Each dried berry of Piper cubeba, a climbing relative of black pepper, keeps a short stalk, and it tastes more bitter and resinous than a peppercorn. Its bite doesn’t even come from the same chemical family as black pepper’s. Cubeb had a long run in European kitchens and pharmacies before it fell out of use, and today you’ll find it mostly in North African spice blends and in gin.

At a glance

What it looks like

The 1918 Dispensatory of the United States described official cubeb as the dried, full-grown, unripe fruit, with a straight, slender, stem-like piece 5 to 7 mm long.³ That stalk is the quickest way to tell cubeb from a black peppercorn. Katzer has seen cubeb confused with so-called cinnamon or cassia buds, and notes that some sources mix it up with allspice, which looks somewhat similar. In India, names of the kabab chini type can mean either cubeb or allspice.⁴

“False cubeb” is a different plant: the Central African Piper guineense.

Flavor and aroma

Katzer describes cubeb as pungent and bitter with a strong terpene aroma, variously called dry and woody, warm and camphor-like, or spicy and peppery. The heat is gentler than black pepper’s, and the finish is resinous and a little medicinal, with an allspice-like warmth. Nobody has pinned down where the bitterness comes from, Katzer notes.⁴

The compounds

Cubeb’s bite comes from a different chemical family than black pepper’s. Katzer credits it to the lignan cubebin, at about 2%, and says the amides that make black and long pepper hot play no real part in cubeb.⁴ In black pepper, by comparison, PROSEA gives piperine at 4.9 to 7.7%.⁵ A 2022 review in Frontiers in Nutrition names cubebin and hinokinin as the most abundant lignans in the berries.²

The smell lives in the essential oil, and reports of what’s in it vary a lot:

These come from different samples and methods, so we don’t combine them. The gap between a sabinene-led oil and one led by methyl eugenol and eugenol is big, and we couldn’t open the original analyses to find out why.

Origin and history

Where it’s native. Kew gives the native range as Indo-China to Malesia, listing Borneo, Cambodia, the Lesser Sunda Islands, Malaya, the Maluku Islands, Myanmar, Sulawesi, Sumatra and Vietnam.¹ The 2022 review calls it native to Java and Borneo,² and the 1918 Dispensatory said it was native to Java, Penang and probably other parts of the East Indies.³ Kew’s list doesn’t name Java. We’re leaving the sources as they stand.

In Europe. The Dispensatory said there was no evidence the ancients knew cubeb, and that Arab traders probably first brought it to Europe. It was once used like black pepper but was found much less powerful and fell out of use.³ Katzer also calls cubeb a once-popular black pepper substitute that fell out of favor, probably because of its bitterness once black pepper got affordable. The name came into European languages through the Arabic al-kabaabah, a word of unknown origin.⁴

You’ll see several other details repeated a lot that we couldn’t trace to a source that meets our standard: that Theophrastus recorded cubeb in Greek trade (the 1918 Dispensatory said there was no evidence the ancients knew it), that Javanese growers scalded the berries so nobody could plant them elsewhere, that it reached Tang dynasty China, that Arab cooks took it up in the 10th century, and that Nicholas Culpeper wrote about it.

As a medicine. Cubeb hung on in the pharmacy long after it left the kitchen. In 1918 it was official in the U.S. pharmacopoeia. The Dispensatory described it as a stimulant acting particularly on the urinary organs, often given in the U.S. and Europe for gonorrhea and also for chronic bronchitis, and noted that in India it had long been used for gonorrhea.³ That’s a record of historical practice, not evidence that it works.

How it is used

Cubeb is now used mostly in North Africa, especially Tunisia and Morocco, where it may go into the complex blend ras el hanout. Moroccan cooks use it in savory dishes and in pastries like markouts, and it flavors Bombay Sapphire gin and Pertsovka, a Russian pepper vodka.²

In your kitchen, cubeb can go where black pepper or allspice would: crushed over roast meats and vegetables, in marinades, or in a spice rub. Grind it fresh and use a lighter hand than you would with black pepper, because the bitterness builds. We couldn’t confirm the claim that it goes into the Indonesian curry gulai.

Buying and quality

Buy whole berries. They keep their stalks, so they’re easy to identify. Adulteration has a long history here: the 1918 Dispensatory said commercial cubebs were not infrequently mixed with, or entirely replaced by, other fruits, and that the powder was said to be sometimes cut with pimenta (allspice).³ We didn’t find any modern grade standard for cubeb.

Storage

Keep whole cubebs airtight, away from heat and light, and grind as you need them. We found no published shelf life for cubeb from a regulator or standards body. As with other peppers, a weak smell when you crush one means the oil has faded.

Safety

The 2022 review reports that cubeb extracts given to animals at up to 2,000 mg/kg of body weight caused no deaths or behavioral changes. It also says more toxicity studies are needed and that there are no clinical data yet on cubeb in people.² We found no regulator assessment of cubeb as a spice.

Health claims

The review’s pharmacology is almost all lab and animal work. Its only human evidence, in the passage we read, is a single case report.² We make no claim that cubeb treats or prevents food poisoning, influenza, urinary infections or anything else. Claims that its sabinene fights salmonella, or that its oil treats flu, had no human evidence behind them that we could find.

Substitutes and comparisons

• Cubeb pepper substitutes
• Black pepper and allspice, the spices it most often stands in for
• Long pepper and grains of paradise, two other once-popular pepper alternatives
• Allspice vs. black pepper
• Cassia buds, sometimes confused with cubeb