Cardamom: History and Traditional Use

Cardamom is the dried seed capsule of Elettaria cardamomum, a shade-loving cousin of ginger from the rain-soaked Western Ghats of southern India. This article follows the documented trail — the Sanskrit ela of the Charaka and Sushruta compendia, the kardamomon that Theophrastus puzzled over and Rome taxed at Alexandria, the medieval Arab trade, the Nordic kitchen (by a route still argued about), the royal monopoly of Travancore, the German planter who carried it to Guatemala in 1914, and the chemists who worked out why it smells the way it does. Where the record is firm we say so; where something is tradition, folklore, or a good story the evidence does not support, we say that too.

Table of Contents

  1. From the Cardamom Hills: Origins, Botany and a Borrowed Name
  2. Ela: Cardamom in the Sanskrit Medical Compendia
  3. Kardamomon and Amomon: Greece, Rome and a Customs List
  4. Hāl: The Arab World, the Medieval Spice Trade and Coffee
  5. Kardemumma: The Nordic Puzzle
  6. A Royal Monopoly: Travancore, the Cardamom Hills and the Planters
  7. Green Gold: How Guatemala Overtook India
  8. Inside the Pod: The Chemists and the Two Molecules
  9. From Commission E to the Clinic
  10. The Queen of Spices Today
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections
  13. Featured Videos

From the Cardamom Hills: Origins, Botany and a Borrowed Name

Green cardamom is native to the wet evergreen forests of the Western Ghats, the mountain chain running down India's south-western edge through Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. It is an understorey plant of the ginger family (Zingiberaceae, which also gives us ginger, turmeric and galangal), wanting shade, monsoon rain and a hill slope between roughly 600 and 1,500 metres. The Cardamom Hills of Kerala's Idukki district are named for it, and it was gathered wild there long before anyone planted it.

The word is Greek before it is anything else in Europe: kardamomon compounds kardamon, cress, with amomon, an Eastern aromatic of uncertain identity; Latin made it cardamomum. India's names are older and closer to the plant — Sanskrit ela, and in Malayalam, the language of Kerala, elam or elakkai. Volume 11 (1692) of Hendrik van Rheede's great flora of Malabar, Hortus Malabaricus, figured the plant under its Malayalam name as "Elettari". Linnaeus placed it on the very first page of Species Plantarum in 1753 as Amomum cardamomum; in 1811 the English physician William George Maton, writing in the Transactions of the Linnean Society, gave it a genus of its own and named it after Rheede's word, Elettaria. Botanists have not finished with it even now: a 2024 study in TAXON used DNA evidence to redraw the genus.

One confusion runs through the whole history: "black cardamom" (Amomum subulatum) is a different genus and a smoke-dried spice, the ancient amomon may have been something of that kind, and an old text that says amomum or cardamomum cannot simply be assumed to mean this plant. The practical green-versus-black difference is set out on the Cardamom hub.

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Ela: Cardamom in the Sanskrit Medical Compendia

The earliest medical record of cardamom that can be read today is Indian. The Charaka Samhita — compiled and revised over centuries, its surviving form usually placed in the early centuries of the Common Era — sorts five hundred drugs into fifty groups of ten by the action they were believed to share (chapter 4 of its opening Sutrasthana). Ela sits in two: the shwasahara group, remedies for laboured breathing, beside surasa (holy basil), asafoetida and agarwood; and the angamarda-prashamana group, remedies for aching of the body. The Sushruta Samhita, of roughly the same era (its dating is disputed), names a whole group after it: chapter 38 of its Sutrasthana lists the Eladi gana, "the group beginning with ela" — a set of aromatics that the text says subdues the vata and kapha humours, counters poison and clears the skin.

Those humours are the framework Ayurvedic physicians used to reason about the body, presented here as history rather than mechanism. What the framework records is unmistakable: from its first appearance in writing, cardamom was a warming aromatic for the chest, the digestion and the skin. Sanskrit called the small, prized kind sukshmaila, "fine ela"; the Ayurvedic Pharmacopoeia of India, the Government of India's official standard, still carries a monograph on it, and Unani medicine, arriving with Persian and Arab physicians, adopted the same spice as heel. Beneath the learned texts runs a household habit that needed no book: pods chewed after a meal to settle the stomach and freshen the breath, still everyday practice across South Asia.

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Kardamomon and Amomon: Greece, Rome and a Customs List

Cardamom was in Athens by the fourth century BCE, though nobody there was sure where it came from. Theophrastus (c. 371–287 BCE), the founder of botany, closes his survey of fragrant plants in Book IX of the Enquiry into Plants by noting that aromatics come partly from India by sea and partly from Arabia, then admits the confusion: cardamom and amomon "some say come from Media; others say that these come from India, as well as spikenard".

Four centuries later the Greek army physician Dioscorides gave it a medical entry near the head of Book One of De Materia Medica (first century CE). The best kardamomon "is brought out of Commagene, Armenia and Bosporus; it grows too in India and Arabia". He advises choosing pods that are hard to break, full and tightly shut, since open ones are stale, and recommends a decoction for coughs, sciatica, griping, kidney complaints and scorpion stings. His contemporary Pliny the Elder, in Book 12 of the Natural History, distinguishes four kinds of cardamomum, the most prized "very green and oily, with sharp corners and awkward to crumble", says it is "gathered in Arabia, in the same manner as amomum", and prices the best at 3 denarii a pound against 60 for clustered amomum.

Rome did more than describe it; Rome taxed it. The second-century customs schedule for luxuries entering Alexandria from the Red Sea trade, preserved in Justinian's Digest (39.4.16.7), lists some fifty-four dutiable goods, and cardamomum stands among them with amomum, pepper, cinnamon and silk; excavators at the Roman Red Sea port of Berenike have reported cardamom among the tariff's plant products recovered there. One caveat belongs here. Commagene and Armenia are nowhere near the Western Ghats, and scholars do not agree on how much of the ancient kardamomon was Elettaria at all: the word may have covered more than one aromatic seed, and the "origins" given are probably markets rather than forests.

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Hāl: The Arab World, the Medieval Spice Trade and Coffee

Pliny's "Arabia" is a clue to how the spice moved. The monsoon winds carried ships between the Malabar coast and the Arabian peninsula in an annual rhythm, and Kerala's cardamom left India on the same vessels as its black pepper. Arabic knows the spice as hāl, and it became so at home in Arab cooking and medicine that many assume it is native there. In medieval Europe it was a luxury of the same class as cloves and cinnamon, imported — by the standard account — chiefly through Venice. The first European to describe it at the source was the Portuguese physician Garcia de Orta, whose Colóquios dos simples e drogas da Índia, printed at Goa in 1563, is the earliest Western treatise on India's medicinal plants; he correctly distinguished the small, intensely aromatic Malabar cardamom from a larger, milder kind traded from Ceylon.

The most famous Arab use of cardamom is younger than most people imagine, because coffee itself is. The earliest solid evidence for coffee drinking comes from the Sufi circles of Yemen in the fifteenth century. When cardamom first went into the pot is not documented, but it became the defining flavour of qahwa (in Gulf dialect gahwa), the pale, bitter coffee poured from a long-spouted dallah as the first act of Arabian hospitality. UNESCO inscribed "Arabic coffee, a symbol of generosity" on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2015, on the joint nomination of the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia (extended to Jordan in 2024). The Gulf remains the largest cardamom market on earth, still for the coffee pot.

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Kardemumma: The Nordic Puzzle

Every Swede knows how cardamom reached the North: the Vikings tasted it in the bazaars of Constantinople — their Miklagard — about a thousand years ago and carried it home. It is a good story, and it is almost certainly not true. Daniel Serra, a culinary archaeologist of Viking-Age and medieval food and co-author of An Early Meal: A Viking Age Cookbook, points out that no archaeological find and no reference in the sagas places cardamom in a Viking-Age kitchen; the earliest continental evidence he can find puts the spice no farther north than Cologne in the eleventh century.

The first Scandinavian document that names cardamom is a cookbook. The Libellus de arte coquinaria, the oldest surviving Nordic recipe collection, is preserved in a Danish manuscript of about 1300 in Copenhagen; among its thirty-five recipes is a sauce for pickling game that calls for cloves, pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and cardamom. Its recipes closely resemble continental and Moorish ones, which is why Serra and others argue that cardamom entered the North by the ordinary medieval routes — overland and Hanseatic trade from the Mediterranean and, ultimately, the Islamic world — rather than in a longship. From that foothold it settled into festive baking and never left: the cardamom bun, kardemummabulle, is a Swedish institution.

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A Royal Monopoly: Travancore, the Cardamom Hills and the Planters

For most of its history cardamom was gathered from wild stands in the Ghats forest, then from "forest gardens" where the undergrowth was cleared around naturally occurring plants and the canopy left standing — still, in essence, how the best Indian cardamom is grown. By the eighteenth century the crop was valuable enough that the kingdom of Travancore, which ruled the southern Ghats, made it a royal monopoly: according to the standard account, growers could sell only to the state depot at the port of Alleppey (Alappuzha), and soldiers watched the hill roads against smuggling. The port's name survives in "Alleppey Green", still the premium Indian grade.

A royal proclamation of April 1822 created the "Cardamom Hills" as an administrative area under two revenue officers charged with promoting cultivation and protecting growers; the monopoly was abolished in 1896 to encourage private planting, and a proclamation of 1897 set aside a Cardamom Hill Reserve of roughly 15,700 acres. That coincided with the plantation era: between about 1880 and the Second World War, planters cleared large tracts of the high Ghats for tea, coffee and cardamom. Idukki remains the heart of Indian production, and India still grows the grades that fetch the highest prices — but by the second half of the twentieth century it no longer grew the most.

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Green Gold: How Guatemala Overtook India

The modern map of cardamom was redrawn by a single planting on the other side of the world. In 1914 — the date most accounts give — Oscar Majus Kloeffer, a German coffee planter at Cobán in Guatemala's Alta Verapaz highlands, put in cardamom from India to diversify his estate. It thrived, spreading over the following decades to tens of thousands of smallholdings. Guatemala produced roughly 800 tonnes a year in the early 1970s and about 4,300 tonnes by the early 1980s, by which time it had overtaken India as the world's leading exporter; today it is the largest producer as well. A 2014 US Department of Agriculture report put Alta Verapaz at about 70 percent of output, counted some 350,000 smallholder families, and noted that almost the whole harvest is exported, overwhelmingly to the Middle East. Growers call it oro verde, green gold.

That is the shape of the trade now: two worlds of one species. India grows the prestige grades and consumes most of its crop; Guatemala grows the bulk of the world's supply on small hill farms and ships it to the Gulf; What has not changed since Travancore's forest gardens is the harvest: capsules on one spray ripen at different times, so the same plants are picked over by hand several times a season, which is why cardamom sits just behind saffron and vanilla among the most expensive spices by weight.

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Inside the Pod: The Chemists and the Two Molecules

What Dioscorides called "sharp" is a volatile oil — a mixture of small, easily evaporated molecules — making up several percent of the seed by weight. Chemists began taking it apart in the 1890s. The laboratory reports of a German essential-oil house in 1897, an analysis by the British chemist E. J. Parry in 1899 and further work by E. Weber, all gathered in the 1913 edition of Gildemeister and Hoffmann's handbook The Volatile Oils, had already identified cineole, terpineol, terpinyl acetate, limonene and sabinene in distilled cardamom oil and put the yield of Malabar seed at 3.5 to 7 percent.

Gas chromatography — which separates a vaporised mixture into its components and measures each — reached essential-oil chemistry in the late 1950s, and in 1965 Nigam, Nigam, Handa and Levi published a gas-chromatographic examination of cardamom oil in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences. By 1982, when Govindarajan and colleagues published a hundred-page review of cardamom's production, chemistry and quality, the modern picture was settled. Two molecules dominate the oil and between them usually make up well over half of it: 1,8-cineole, also called eucalyptol, which supplies the cool, camphor-like, faintly medicinal edge, and α-terpinyl acetate, an ester that supplies the sweet, floral, slightly fruity warmth. Their balance varies with origin and drying — Guatemalan lots often run more cineole-forward than a good Alleppey Green — and both evaporate readily, which is the chemistry behind an old kitchen rule: a whole pod keeps its aroma for a year or more, while ground cardamom loses most of its character within months.

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From Commission E to the Clinic

Of all the things tradition claimed for cardamom, the one modern regulators have accepted is the oldest and plainest: it is good for the digestion. Germany's Commission E, the government's expert panel on herbal medicines, published an approved monograph for cardamom fruit (Cardamomi fructus) for dyspeptic complaints — indigestion, fullness and wind — at an average daily dose of 1.5 g. The US Food and Drug Administration lists cardamom among spices "generally recognized as safe" for food (21 CFR 182.10). The pharmacology behind the digestive reputation was examined in 2008 by Anwar Gilani's group at Aga Khan University in Karachi, who found in isolated gut tissue and in animals that a cardamom extract contains both a gut-stimulating and a gut-relaxing component, lowers blood pressure and acts as a mild diuretic — a laboratory rationalisation, they wrote, of its traditional uses, and a starting point rather than proof in people.

The human trial record is small and recent. In 2009 a group at RNT Medical College in Udaipur gave twenty newly diagnosed people with stage-1 hypertension 3 g of cardamom powder a day for twelve weeks and reported that blood pressure fell and clot-dissolving activity rose — encouraging, but uncontrolled. Randomised, placebo-controlled trials followed in Iran between 2016 and 2019, typically 3 g a day for two to three months in people with pre-diabetes, type 2 diabetes or fatty liver disease, with mixed results: in eighty overweight pre-diabetic women, cholesterol improved within the cardamom group but not significantly against placebo. The meta-analyses are correspondingly cautious. A 2020 pooling of seven trials found that cardamom lowered triglycerides but not total, LDL or HDL cholesterol or fasting glucose; a 2024 pooling of eight studies found modest falls in inflammatory markers and in blood pressure — systolic by about half a millimetre of mercury — and urged caution given how few studies exist. The honest summary: the digestive claim is the best-grounded, the cardiometabolic effects seen so far are small, and the studies are short and few. Doses and designs are taken up in the companion Cardamom Benefits articles on digestive health (see also functional dyspepsia) and blood pressure and the heart.

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The Queen of Spices Today

The thing itself has barely changed: the tight green pod Dioscorides told his readers to choose is the pod a Kerala picker grades today and a Riyadh host crushes into the dallah. The uses are continuous too: a warming aromatic for the stomach and the breath in Sushruta's Eladi group, a digestive in Dioscorides, a stomachic in Unani, and, two thousand years on, an approved remedy for indigestion in a German regulatory monograph. Tradition asked a narrow question of cardamom and modern evidence has so far given a narrow answer: yes, for the digestion; perhaps, and modestly, for blood pressure and blood fats; nothing yet that justifies the larger claims on supplement labels.

Honouring that history also means letting go of the parts that do not survive checking. The Viking longship full of cardamom is a legend laid over a medieval fact. The often-repeated claim that cardamom grew in the garden of an eighth-century-BCE Babylonian king rests on a cuneiform plant list whose published reading names coriander, cress, thyme and mint but not cardamom, so it is left out here. What remains is remarkable enough: a plant from one rain-forest mountain range that has been prescribed, perfumed, taxed, monopolised, carried across an ocean and finally analysed molecule by molecule — and is still, in every culture that adopted it, offered to a guest as a sign of welcome.

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Key Research Papers

The list covers the peer-reviewed reviews of cardamom's botany, chemistry and pharmacology, the landmarks of its analytical chemistry, the archaeology of the spice trade, and the first human trials and meta-analyses; the historical primary texts are named in the article rather than cited here.

  1. Ashokkumar K, Murugan M, Dhanya MK, Warkentin TD (2020). Botany, traditional uses, phytochemistry and biological activities of cardamom [Elettaria cardamomum (L.) Maton] — A critical review. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. — PubMed PMID: 31541721
  2. Govindarajan VS, Narasimhan S, Raghuveer KG, Lewis YS (1982). Cardamom — production, technology, chemistry, and quality. Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition. — PubMed PMID: 7039980
  3. Nigam MC, Nigam IC, Handa KL, Levi L (1965). Essential Oils and Their Constituents XXVIII. Examination of Oil of Cardamom by Gas Chromatography. Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences. — doi:10.1002/jps.2600540533
  4. Poulsen AD, Fér T, Marasinghe LDK, Sabu M, Hughes M, Valderrama E, Leong-Škorničková J (2024). The cardamom conundrum resolved: Recircumscription and placement of Elettaria in the only pantropically distributed ginger lineage. TAXON. — doi:10.1002/tax.13242
  5. Van der Veen M, Morales J (2015). The Roman and Islamic spice trade: New archaeological evidence. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. — PubMed PMID: 25278182
  6. Gilani AH, Jabeen Q, Khan AU, Shah AJ (2008). Gut modulatory, blood pressure lowering, diuretic and sedative activities of cardamom. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. — PubMed PMID: 18037596
  7. Verma SK, Jain V, Katewa SS (2009). Blood pressure lowering, fibrinolysis enhancing and antioxidant activities of cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum). Indian Journal of Biochemistry & Biophysics. — PubMed PMID: 20361714
  8. Fatemeh Y, Siassi F, Rahimi A, Koohdani F, Doostan F, Qorbani M, Sotoudeh G (2017). The effect of cardamom supplementation on serum lipids, glycemic indices and blood pressure in overweight and obese pre-diabetic women: a randomized controlled trial. Journal of Diabetes and Metabolic Disorders. — PubMed PMID: 29026804
  9. Asbaghi O, Eslampour E, Reiner Ž, Badehnoosh B, Kolahdooz F, Moradi S, Hashemi Dizaji S, Asemi Z (2020). Effect of green cardamom on lipoproteins, glycemic control and anthropometric parameters: A meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials. Clinical Nutrition ESPEN. — PubMed PMID: 32359750
  10. Heydarian A, Tahvilian N, Shahinfar H, Abbas-Hashemi SA, Daryabeygi-Khotbehsara R, Aryaeian N (2024). Effect of cardamom consumption on inflammation and blood pressure in adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials. Food Science & Nutrition. — PubMed PMID: 38268891

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. PubMed: Cardamom ethnobotany and traditional use
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