Allspice

Allspice is a single dried berry from one New World tree rather than a blend of several spices, a point both its English and its Greek names manage to obscure. Bahari doubles as an everyday Greek word for spice, and baharika means spices in general, so a Greek recipe calling for bahari is asking for this one berry and nothing broader.

It sits with cinnamon at the centre of Greek savoury spicing, most obviously in the mince for moussaka and pastitsio, in keftedes and soutzoukakia, and in the filling for dolmades. Whole berries go into a long braise such as stifado and are lifted out at the end, while ground allspice is worked into meat mixtures where nothing can be fished back out later.

Whole berries keep their aroma for a year or more in a jar, where ground allspice fades within a few months and turns flat and slightly dusty, so buying whole and crushing what a dish needs is worth the small effort. The most common error is treating it as interchangeable with mixed spice or pumpkin spice blends, which carry ginger and nutmeg and pull a Greek dish somewhere else entirely.