Queen of spices

Green cardamom or true cardamom is an ancient spice that grew wild in the southern forests of India and has been used for centuries in food and therapy, write Anurag Mallick & Priya Ganapathy

Hailed as the ‘Queen of Spices,’ cardamom is one of the most expensive spices on the planet. The dark seeds found within a light green pod of perennial plants belonging to Zingiberaceae, the ginger family is recognised by its two main forms — Elettaria cardamomum, the more popular smaller fusiform variety with a thin peel called chhoti elaichi, and the larger woodier dark brown Amomum subulatum, better known as badi elaichi. The latter is found mostly in Eastern Himalayas and China and used in naturopathy and certain food preparations like meat dishes, stews and barbecue sauces, owing to its bolder flavour.

Green cardamom or true cardamom is an ancient spice that grew wild in the southern forests of India and has been used for centuries in food and therapy. One of the oldest spices in the world, it was known across India by myriad regional names, derivatives of its Sanskrit label — eli or ela. It is called elaichi in Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kashmiri, elach in Bengali, yelakki in Kannada, yelakkai in Tamil and Telugu and elathari in Malayalam. The West called it cardamom from its Greek root kardamomom or amomum. The Cardamom Hills or Yela Mala in Kerala’s Idukki district gets its name from the spice that grows in its cool climes, along with pepper.

The moist forests of the Western Ghats in Kerala’s Malabar region and Kodagu, Chikmagalur and Uttar Kannada districts of Karnataka provided the ideal environment for growing cardamom, known locally as maley yalakki or yelakki (hill cardamom). In the past, it used to be a secret wealth found in the wild cardamom jungles, that called for elaborate harvesting operations by bands of tribal folks led by Kodavas; its trade was under the monopoly of the Rajas and later the government. Kodagu’s green cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum) growing at an elevation of 3,000 to 5,000 ft is a smaller variety with an alluring light green hue and unique aroma, flavour, taste and volatile oil content, that sets it apart from green cardamom produced elsewhere in the country. Owing to its superior characteristics, the indigenous Coorg Green Cardamom earned a GI tag in 2008, thereby receiving a boost in status in the market. The tiny district accounts for over 40% of Karnataka’s total cardamom production.

In the plantations of Southern India, cardamom planting is done after the monsoons and the plants sprout pods in 2-3 years. The fruit matures 120 days after flowering and begins to yield green cardamom pods on trailing stalks at the base of the stem. These are hand-picked or clipped before they ripen during the monsoons around August until Dec-Jan. Unlike most other traditional spices, the timing, care and labour-intensive nature of the harvesting process make it a more unique and expensive spice. Once harvested, the pods are sun-dried or cured in wood-based kilns to remove moisture and retain their green colour. This is then graded according to size, colour, weight and chemical constituents. In some places, they are bleached with sulphur fumes to remove the green tint. True cardamom’s colour often varies from green to pale yellow, straw and brown. Being native to the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia, cardamom has been extensively used in cooking and trade. It appears in the texts of the world’s oldest civilisations dating to 5000BC, such as the Sumerian culture of Mesopotamia and ancient Vedic and Ayurvedic treatises like Charaka Samhita and Chanakya’s Arthashashtra. Records suggest that cardamom was traded both by overland and sea for centuries.

It is a rich source of Vitamin C and antioxidants and a mood enhancer or stimulant. It is a famed tridoshic in Ayurveda, capable of balancing the triad of doshas in the body — vata, pitta and kapha, and an excellent liver purifier and detoxicant. Like fennel, cardamom also makes a great mouth freshener. It is said that the Egyptians of yore chewed these tiny cardamom seeds as a tooth cleanser and breath freshener.

Cardamom wheedled its way into a variety of cuisines, imparting a distinct irresistible warm, pungent, fruity sweet flavour to Indian curries, desserts like
gulab jamun and kheer, biryanis and pulaos, masala chai, Swedish pastries, coffee and more. Tossed in as a full pod, partially cracked open, or just peeled seeds that could be powdered, toasted or used whole, it infuses a heady uplifting aroma and taste, making it a major ingredient in not only Indian garam masala, but several spice mixtures across the globe — zhoug of Yemen, baharat in Syria, Turkey and Iraq and Malaysian masalas. In the Middle East, cardamom was ground with coffee in a mortar and cooked in a skillet to make mixtures of 40% cardamom. Cardamom coffee is symbolic of good hospitality and prestige and Bedouin nomads carried coffee pots with a special chamber in the spouts to hold cardamom pods! Even today, in Lebanon, regular coffee or mazbuta is typically served with a pinch of cardamom powder and drops of orange blossom water. It is enigmatic how cardamom became an indispensable part of Scandinavian cuisine where it features in Swedish pastries, cardamom buns, krumkake — the sweet cone shape cookie, Finnish sweet bread pulla, hearty eats like Swedish meatballs, chicken dishes and stews, the Christmas mulled wine called glogg and Norwegian Jule Kake bread. As recently as the 1800s, most of the world’s supply of cardamom came from Kerala. During the 19th century, European colonisation and trade witnessed the growth of cardamom cultivation from its original lands to other regions such as Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Indo China and Tanzania. It is said, in 1914, just before World War I, Oscar Majus Kloffer a German coffee planter introduced Indian cardamom from the Western Ghats in his estate in Coban, Guatemala, and broke the Indian monopoly over this lucrative spice.

The journey of this versatile green gem from the bottom of the moist forest floors of South India to a heavenly bite of warm, braided cinnamon-cardamom bread with hot coffee during a Swedish fika, is nothing short of an epicurean fantasy gone real.

(The authors are travel/food writers and culinary consultants “loosely based” in Bengaluru. They run a travel/media outfit customising solutions for the hospitality industry, have authored guides and coffee table books, set up an award-winning restaurant and feature as ‘Dude aur Deewani’ in a new food-based digital infotainment show. Follow their adventures on Instagram: @red_scarab or their Facebook page Red Scarab.)