Cardamom: Most expensive ingredient

Cardamom is known as an expensive cooking spice and for being beneficial to the digestive system in a variety of ways. Cardamom seeds whole or in powdered form are regarded as one of the most valuable spices, often employed in the preparation of curry powder, pickles, sausages, cakes and confectionery.

Cardamom is added to traditional sweets and teas for its cool, minty aroma and flavor.

Cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum Maton), the Queen of all spices has a history as old as human race. It is one of the high priced and exotic spices in the world. It is a perennial tropical herb plant belonging to the ginger family (Zingibaraceae) and grows from a thick rootstalk up to around 6-10 feet.

It is valued for its acceptable taste, flavour and aroma. Large cardamom has a fresh and spicy aroma. By virtue of the traditional drying procedure over open flames, the spice also acquires a smoky flavour.

The seeds have a pleasant aroma and a characteristic warm, slightly pungent taste. The aroma and medicinal properties of cardamom are due to the volatile oil present in it and it is obtained from the seeds by steam distillation.

Cardamom contains an abundance of antioxidants, which protect the body against aging and stress, and fight common sicknesses and bodily strife.
Cardamom: Most expensive ingredient

History of herbs

Long before humans began to cultivate their own crops, they hunted and foraged for food. Eventually they found that they could produce larger quantities of grain and vegetables through farming, but the plants that made their meals more interesting still grew in the rocky places that were unsuitable to cereal agriculture.

The plants that call ‘herbs’ continued to be hunted in the wild, - indeed in many parts of the world they still are. The legend tells that people learned about herbs by observing animals and how they reacted to various plants.

If eating a particular plant resulted in a certain behavior or physical change, such as lethargy, then it was thought the plants had caused its. It is also how poisonous plants were discovered.

60 000 years ago, Neanderthal man valued herbs as medicinal agents. The antiquity of the use of herbs can be deduced from oral traditions and legends transmitted by the shamans or medicine men or Eurosia and the Americas.

It seems probable that many of the flavoring herbs now in use were similarly employed before the erection of the pyramids and also that many then popular no longer appear in modern lists of esculents.

The Ebers Papyrus is the oldest written herbal known to exists, written about 1500 BC. It names more than one hundred and twenty-five pants with eight hundred and eleven prescriptions for salves, poultices, gargles, inhalations, enemas, suppositories, pills, liquid medicines and directions for fumigation.

In temperate regions, where most herbs have little pungency compared to those of Mediterranean or tropical climates, herbs added interest to an otherwise bland and monotonous diet, whether of cereals, roots or a little meat or fish.

Relying upon Biblical records alone, several herbs were highly esteemed prior to current era; in the gospels of Matthew and Luke reference is made to tithes of mint, anise, rue, cumin and other "herbs"; and, more than 700 years previously, Isaiah speaks of the sowing and threshing of cumin which, since the same passage (Isaiah xxviii, 25) also speaks of "fitches" (vetches), wheat, barley and "rie" (rye), seems then to have been a valued crop.

The Muslims, who arrived in eastern Asia in the 9th and 10th centuries, were probably responsible for the appearance of cloves in Zanzibar and Mombasa before the Portuguese arrived there, and would have contributed to the spread of Indonesians spices in the Middle East and Europe.

Later, specific plants that produced known effects were grown in monasteries and studied by both clergy and doctors.
History of herbs