Why cardamom is in everything

The first time somebody follows a Swedish bun recipe they usually stop and read the cardamom line twice. Then they halve it, because it must be wrong.

It is not wrong. Swedish bun dough carries cardamom at a level that no other European baking tradition asks for, and it is the difference between a kanelbulle and a cinnamon scroll.

How much more, actually

Here is where it pays to be careful. There is a statistic all over the internet, that Swedes eat eighteen times more cardamom than the average country, or sixty times more than Americans, and nothing appears to sit underneath it. Every version traces back to an article citing "UN data" with no dataset, no year and no table, and then everyone quotes the article. The sixty-times version has no source at all.

What does exist is trade data. The EU's own market figures put Swedish cardamom imports at around 223 tonnes in 2023. That is about six per cent of all EU cardamom imports, for a country with about two per cent of the EU's population. Divided out, that is roughly 21 grams a head per year against Germany's 8.

So: two and a half to three times, not eighteen. That is arithmetic on somebody else's import figures, and imports are not consumption. Some is re-exported, some goes to industry, some sits in a warehouse. It is still a real difference, and it does not need inflating.

Norway comes out higher than Sweden on the same data, which nobody ever mentions. And there is a genuinely odd detail in the same figures: Sweden imports about 59 per cent of its cardamom whole, while Norway imports 86 per cent of its already ground. Two neighbouring countries with the same tradition, one buying pods and one buying powder.

Where it came from

You will hear that the Swedish East India Company brought it back in the seventeen hundreds.

That company was real, sailed out of Gothenburg from 1731, and ran well over a hundred expeditions. It also went almost entirely to Canton. By the seventeen seventies tea was around ninety per cent of the value of its cargo, with porcelain most of the rest. Cardamom is a South Indian crop, and after the first charter the company had largely given up on Indian ports. It is a tea company, and the cardamom claim does not survive contact with its own manifests.

Nor does the Viking version. It has Norsemen bringing cardamom home from Constantinople, and a culinary archaeologist who works on the period says plainly that there is not much evidence of imported spices in Viking-age use at all. The earliest written reference to cardamom in Scandinavia is a thirteenth-century Danish cookbook, with recipes closely resembling Moorish ones, which points at Iberia and the overland routes rather than at longships.

Unglamorously, cardamom arrived in Sweden the way it arrived everywhere in northern Europe: gradually, expensively, through Hanseatic and overland trade, as an apothecary and aristocratic good, and it became ordinary when it became affordable. What is distinctive is not how it got there. It is that Sweden kept using it at that volume after everyone else moved on.

Green, and only green

Two different plants share the name. Green cardamom is Elettaria cardamomum. Black cardamom is Amomum subulatum, dried over fire, smoky and resinous, and a savoury spice. It has no place in a bun and the substitution is not a near miss.

Green cardamom's aroma is dominated by two compounds. 1,8-cineole is the eucalyptus, camphorous, sharp end. α-terpinyl acetate is the sweet floral part, the part that reads as bun. They occur in similar quantities, and they do not survive equally: cineole is the more volatile of the two and goes first.

Which is the entire argument for buying pods and grinding them. Pre-ground cardamom is not fake, it is just further along the same road, and the road only runs one way. Ground cardamom in a jar loses its top notes within months rather than years. Confident figures circulate for exactly how many months, and they trace back to shops selling spices, so treat them as sales copy.

Buy pods. Crack them, take the black seeds out, grind them with a spoonful of the recipe's sugar so the oils have something to hold on to. Do it the day you bake.

One more thing worth knowing

Most of the world's green cardamom now comes from Guatemala, not India. A German coffee planter put Keralan cardamom into the ground at Cobán in 1914 to undercut the Indian monopoly, and it worked: Guatemala passed India as the leading exporter in the nineteen seventies and has been the largest producer since around the turn of the century.

Recent forecasts have pointed at a sharply reduced Guatemalan harvest, which is the sort of thing that eventually shows up as a price on a Swedish bun. The most Swedish spice in the world is a Central American crop, and has been for most of a century.