Cardamom

Elettaria cardamomum

Also: Green cardamom, Elaichi, Queen of spices

WarmingDryingTonifying

The warm heart of chai, for gas, bloating, and a damp chest.

The papery green pods of a tall, shade-loving ginger relative, each holding sticky black seeds full of sweet, camphor-bright oil. Cardamom warms and dries a cold, bloated gut and a wet, coughing chest, and its flavor makes bitter formulas easier to take.

Energetics: Hot, drying, toning
Taste: Aromatic, pungent, sweet
Family: Zingiberaceae (ginger family)
Parts used: Seed pods and seeds

Medicinal uses 3

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Traditional useLab and mechanism studiesClinical studies

Indigestion & bloatingTLC
Eases gas and bloating and relaxes a cramping gut that runs cold and damp, alone or as the base of a warming blend.
Sluggish liver & digestionTLC
Brings back an appetite lost to illness or long weakness.
Wet cough & congestionTLC
Dries excess mucus in the airways and calms the urge to cough.

Preparations

Crushed-pod tea, chai, iced summer drinks, and a flavor for bitter blends.

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Cautions

Large amounts heat and dry; pair it with cooling or moistening herbs if you run hot and dry.
With gallstones, check with your practitioner before taking medicinal amounts.

Pregnancy & breastfeeding

PregnancyFood and tea amounts

One of the safest spices in pregnancy, eaten daily through pregnancy across South Asia and the Middle East for millennia, with no action on the uterus.

BreastfeedingFood and tea amounts

Food and tea amounts are considered compatible while nursing.

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Folklore

Cardamom grows wild in the Western Ghats of southern India, where the Cardamom Hills are named for it. By weight it is among the costliest spices, behind saffron and vanilla. A German coffee planter brought it to Guatemala around 1914, and Guatemala now grows more than India, shipping most of its crop to the Middle East, where much of it is brewed into coffee.

How to grow

A ginger-family perennial for deep shade, steady warmth, and humidity, hardy only in the tropics; elsewhere it makes a fragrant-leaved houseplant that rarely flowers. On plantations its flowers rise on long stalks that sprawl along the ground, and the pods are picked by hand, a few at a time, just before they ripen.

In the wild

Moist evergreen forest in the Western Ghats of southern India and in Sri Lanka. It is also farmed in Guatemala, Tanzania, and Papua New Guinea.

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