Juniper

A juniper berry is not a berry. It is the fleshy female cone of Juniperus communis, a scale-leaved conifer, and the scales have fused into something that looks and handles like fruit. It takes two to three years to ripen from green to the dusty blue-black of the usable spice, which is why a single bush carries both colours at once.

The flavour is resinous, piney and faintly citrus, driven by alpha-pinene and myrcene, and it has a particular affinity with two things: fat and gaminess. That is why it turns up wherever those meet. Venison, boar and hare sausages across northern and central Europe, the Alpine cured meats including speck and the Tyrolean and Slovenian styles, the Polish kiełbasa jałowcowa which is named for it, the Scandinavian and Baltic game preparations, and the Italian mountain traditions from Valtellina to the Val d'Aosta. Bresaola commonly carries it. It is essentially absent from the southern Italian and Spanish sausage traditions.

Juniper works especially well against strong-flavoured meat because the resin cuts through rather than adding to the richness, in the way a squeeze of lemon does for oily fish. In a fat-heavy game sausage a few crushed berries do more for balance than a larger weight of a warm spice.

The practical craft note is to crush rather than grind, and to crush late. The berry is soft and slightly oily, so it clogs a spice mill and pastes rather than powdering. A knife blade or a pestle, giving a coarse crack that releases the oil without pulverising the skin, is the usual approach. Whole berries are the form for brines and braises where they can be removed. The aroma is volatile and a crushed berry left overnight is a weaker berry.

Some recipes call for juniper in the smoke rather than the mix, adding branches or berries to the fire, which is traditional in parts of the Alps and Scandinavia and contributes a resinous note to the surface rather than the interior.