Ingredients · Spice

Caraway

Carum carvi · Apiaceae (carrot family)

Caraway
The rye-bread seed — warm, sharp, anise-like and a little bready, mostly carvone with limonene and anethole behind it. Three products carry it. For a lot of Canadian families this is a grandmother's spice: sauerkraut, goulash, seed cake, a dark loaf. It is often confused with cumin and they are not interchangeable in either direction; caraway is sweeter and sharper, cumin is earthier and smokier.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partSeed
KindSpice
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromFinland, the Netherlands (main growers)
TasteWarm, sharp and anise-like, a little citrusy and bready; the aroma is mostly carvone

How to use it

A tablespoon per loaf in rye bread. In sauerkraut, coleslaw, goulash and pork. In seed cake and shortbread. Toast the seeds first if you want them louder. In harissa. Crush them for a rub; leave them whole in bread and kraut.

With food

Rye and sourdough. Cabbage and sauerkraut. Pork and sausage. Cheese, especially Havarti and Gouda. Apple. Potato. Beetroot. Onion.

With spices

Coriander seed and fennel. Dill. Juniper, with pork. Black pepper. Chile and garlic, in harissa. Anise.

With tea

A black breakfast tea with seed cake, which is how it was eaten in the Victorian era. Peppermint and fennel in a digestive cup.

Its story

Where it comes from

Native across western Asia, Europe and North Africa. Finland grows about 30 per cent of the world crop on some 1,500 farms over more than 20,000 hectares, and its growers say the long, light summer nights give the seed more essential oil. Holland was the leading grower in Mrs Grieve's day. Our lot names no origin.

What happened

Caraway is a spice about staying put. Folk belief held that it kept whatever held it from being stolen, kept lovers from straying — so it went into love potions — and kept fowl and pigeons at home; Mrs Grieve records that tame pigeons will never stray if given a piece of baked caraway dough in their cote. Shakespeare put it in an orchard: Justice Shallow offers Falstaff "a last year's pippin of mine own graffing, with a dish of caraways." In Jane Eyre, the one warm evening in a cold school is tea and a good-sized seed cake in Miss Temple's room. English seed-cake recipes run from 1591 through Hannah Glasse and Elizabeth Moxon to Mrs Beeton, and roasted apples with caraway are still served at Trinity College, Cambridge and at London livery dinners. Farmers once made caraway seed cake for the feast at the end of wheat-sowing.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

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