In the fourth century BC, Theophrastus mentioned komakon, including it with cinnamon and cassia as an ingredient in aromatic confections.

[4] It is unlikely Greeks acquired them from somewhere else, since Javanese growers protected their monopoly of the trade by sterilizing the berries by scalding, ensuring that the vines were unable to be cultivated elsewhere.

Tang physicians administered it to restore appetite, cure "demon vapors", darken the hair, and perfume the body.

'Common Words Used Daily'), Vietnamese scholar-official Phạm Đình Hổ glossed 蓽䔲茄 "cubeb" (Sino-Vietnamese: tất đăng gia) as 乙 ớt, which currently denotes chilli pepper from the Americas.

[8][9] The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, compiled in the 9th century, mentions cubeb as a remedy for infertility, showing it was already used by Arabs for medicinal purposes.

Ludovico Maria Sinistrari, a Roman Catholic priest who wrote about methods of exorcism in the late 17th century, includes cubeb as an ingredient in an incense to ward off an incubus.

[13] The dried cubeb berries contain essential oil comprising monoterpenes (sabinene 50%, α-thujene, and carene) and sesquiterpenes (caryophyllene, copaene, α- and β-cubebene, δ-cadinene, germacrene), the oxides 1,4- and 1,8-cineole and the alcohol cubebol.

They differ only in the position of the alkene moiety, with the double-bond being endocyclic (part of the five-membered ring) in α-cubebene, as shown, but exocyclic in β-cubebene.

[1] Physicians in the Islamic Golden Age distilled "water of al butm" (turpentine) from a mixture of herbal products, including cubeb.

(They are) given in all stages of gonorrhea"[17] and The National Botanic Pharmacopoeia printed in 1921 stated that cubeb was "an excellent remedy for flour albus or whites".

Cubeb, combined with stramonium, eucalyptus, and other plant extracts, was once, beginning in the 1880s, frequently used in the form of cigarettes for asthma, chronic pharyngitis, and hay fever.

[23] In 2000, cubeb oil was included in the list of ingredients found in cigarettes, published by the Tobacco Prevention and Control Branch of North Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services.

Pertsivka, a dark brown Ukrainian pepper-flavoured horilka with a burning taste, is prepared by infusion with cubeb and capsicum peppers.