The Secret Ingredient: Cardamom
The Secret Ingredient: Cardamom
"She wasn’t there to make the food, but I needed that food. I couldn’t live without it."
Before we get into this wonderful interview with Natasha — a conversation that I found quite moving and inspiring — I wanted to announce the first in-person meetup for soft leaves subscribers:
Sunday October 2nd, 3-5pm at McGolrick Park
Filled Bread Party: Bake something sweet or savory to share!
Buns! Baozi! Empanadas! Kolache! Imeruli khachapuri! Aloo naan! Poğaça! Potato zrazy! Curry puffs! Hot pockets! Jamaican patties! Jelly doughnuts! Stuffed cupcakes! Mooncakes! Cream puffs! Bings! Piroshki! Párek v rohlíku! Ham-and-cheese croissants! Calzones!
I can’t wait to see what you come up with! But don’t stress — if your dough turns out heavy and flat the way my first buns did, we’ll still want to try it, or if it’s such a disaster that you pick up some jelly doughnuts on the way over, you’re still very much welcome. I’ll share more details as we get closer to the date, but it’s never too early to try a test bake ;)
“Simple and elemental. You look at her list of ingredients and you can’t believe you need so little to make something so good. Comforting and centering, just like the way she speaks and moves through space.” This is how I described Natasha’s cooking vibes recently. We met in culinary school, where we sometimes found ourselves coming from opposite attitudes, experiences, or tastes, but perhaps because of that, I think we’ve been able to learn so much from each other. When I cook kitchari, the lentil-and-rice porridge that she mentions here, I feel like there’s no other food in the world I need, and I always think of her. Similarly when I have a hot drink of almond milk, cardamom, and maple syrup before bed.
Since culinary school, we’ve both had babies, exactly 6 months apart. I’ve been able to watch her cook for Matteo and begin to introduce her grandmother’s recipes to a new generation that will find comfort and home in them. I have a copy of her beautiful cookbook — Legacy — full of her versions of her grandmother’s recipes, so I hope to make them for Miro soon too.
To see more of her recipes, follow her blog at Plant To Table. I also ran her almond cardamom cookie recipe awhile back.
Natasha: You could smell the fragrance when you came into my house, because I would make these little biscuits with almond flour and cardamom. Cardamom scones and cardamom biscuits. I have maple syrup that was infused with cardamom. I just became associated with it. If I didn’t talk about cardamom, people would think it was strange.
It's my favorite remedy because it's such a simple nerve tonic and I think so many people can benefit from that. It counteracts the effects of sugar. It’s been used throughout history to the same effect. Turkish coffee has cardamom in it because it dulls the effects of the caffeine on the nervous system. Egyptians used to use it. It’s used in baked goods in lots of countries as well. It comes from the same plant or the same lineage as ginger and turmeric, which surprised me because I didn't think it was anything like those.
Kate: When did you start using cardamom — have you always liked it?
Pretty much every story that I have around food originates from my grandmother. She put cardamom in things like rice. It would never override the taste and I don’t think I ever realized it was in there until I’d bite on it. And then I would realize, Oh yeah, there is actually an underlying hint of cardamom. And she would make these beautiful very light desserts made out of agar and coconut and rose and cardamom, all very pacifying things. Fragrant, kind of sweet, but sweet from the spice rather than sweet from the sugar. It really fed something in me. It sat well on my palate. My mum, she wanted to be more integrated into British society. So she cooked lots of different things but rarely Indian food, and her idea of dessert was a strudel with vanilla ice cream over the top or a pecan pie, which were all very heavy, very sticky and not something, even at that age, that my body really wanted.
I lived with my grandmother when I was about 12, 13. Just me and her together, and she would make this stuff and it would always be in the fridge. I turned vegetarian at that age and my mom didn’t approve of that, she didn’t make any special dishes. So I tended to eat the food made by my grandma. During the week, my grandmother cooked and my family would come over and have dinner. And then on the weekend we would go out to places, and I would have a salad and orange juice but they would have a coke and a pizza. We just always ate differently because I didn't like the effect that this stuff had on my body. And that was the difference, that whenever I ate my grandmother’s cooking I didn’t feel as bad. I liked kitchari because it made me feel good. I requested those dishes over and over again. They were super simple, super nutritious dishes. I think my body just felt like [sighs with relief] when I ate them.
K: I like this understanding of health, because health or wellness get so moralized, but the way you’re talking about it — being a kid and eating something and then feeling better — is what it’s all about. Did you become interested in cooking during that time, or did you just like to eat your grandmother’s food?
I didn't cook because the kitchen my grandmother’s domain. No one cooked in her kitchen. I’d lay the table and I’d be her official taster. She wouldn’t put anything on the table without me tasting it. And nothing really ever needed seasoning. It baffled me because she would make meat that she didn’t eat, and didn’t need to taste it to season.
I lived outside of London for a couple of years. And then I moved back to take a new job, which was basically where you evaluate asset managers. That means that people are trying to entertain you all the time, everyone wanted to chat over lunch or dinner. And so I spent a lot of years tasting all the food at the different restaurants in London and that was probably why I enjoyed my job so much. Food became a bigger part of my life. I lived in Singapore for a little while for work — the Asian markets were my speciality so I went to Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. I went on holiday to as many Asian countries as possible. I loved Vietnamese food, I loved the broths and the freshness of the leaves even around the fried food. My best friend and I would make our way all around the different regions and to Cambodia. Then I’d cook stuff that I discovered and wanted to replicate.
K: So then how did you get started with trying to recreate your grandmother's food?
Trying to recreate my grandmother’s food came much later in life, mainly after she passed away. Over the years, because I always had access to her food, I wouldn’t have deigned to make it. We always said, we have to write your recipes down. Food for our family is centered around my grandmother at the table. It unites our family, no matter what is going down. My grandmother would sit sometimes with us — she rarely sat down but when she did she would tell us stories about growing up in Africa. They went from selling candy on the street to owning a supermarket. She’d tell stories about how she chopped her finger off using the salami slicer. We all said that we would write that book, that we would write the recipes down, that we would write the stories down, and we just never did.
My grandma had this thing about her where no matter how old she was, she was so active that I think we all just mistook her age. She never complained about how much pain she was in, but she was actually aging. The day she got ill was the day she checked into a flight to come to me. She packed two suitcases: one of them was full of food and some of her tools. Because now I was in my house in America, I was far away and I said, I need you to teach me these recipes. She checked in for the flight, went into hospital that night and then passed away two days later. So I had this suitcase of stuff she had packed. I took it back with me and started there because now there was no one left to be able to…She wasn’t there to make the food, but I needed that food. I couldn’t live without it.
So I had to learn. I had to learn for me but I had to learn for my family because that was their soul medicine as well. It was all I could think about. It was like the story of my grief. That’s how I talked to her, through recreating this stuff. Knowing that I had to do it for my family, and that I had to do it for me to survive that grief because I couldn't let go at that point. I took the recipes that I thought the family would miss the most and started there. I started with kitchari. Samosas were a thing she used to make thousands of to be sold for charity or to exchange them for hairdressing services or things like that. That was the one I was most scared of because it’s the most complicated. So that one came a lot later but yeah, I just started with the dishes, one-by-one.
And then whilst I was writing that book I was drawn to Ayurveda as a formal science because that was also what she was practicing without really talking about it. I went to the open day [of an Ayurveda school] and the teacher reminded me of my grandmother. I overwhelmingly felt this person had the presence of my grandmother, so I signed up right there and then.
The dishes that the teacher made, every single dish was amazing. It was just simple vegetables, spices, no meat. It all reminded me of how I felt when I was eating my grandmother's food but the dishes themselves were not similar, probably because she's from a different part of India. But I understood why my grandmother cooked the way she did.
My grandmother dominantly used cumin, coriander and turmeric and those are all digestive spices meant to cool down the system. Which is interesting, because we're a very heated family and the predominant dosha for us is Pitta, which is fiery/heated. Kitchari is cooling, it’s detoxifying. So you can see why she cooked the way she did, simple stuff but with very specific spices. I call it spicing with intention. When you go to an Indian restaurant in a commercial place, they dump spices in to up the volume of the taste. The biggest difference between Ayurvedic food and Indian food is that you spice with intention to do whatever it is you’re trying to do. Ayurvedic kitchens will often have different spice mixes — one’s called energizing, one’s called digestive spice — and you’re meant to use them specifically for either the person you’re cooking for, the element you’re cooking for, how you’re feeling, what time of the day it is, what time of the season it is. You’re supposed to use your spices very intentionally.
And that’s where I’ve used cardamom. I recommend it all the time for sleep anxiety or counteracting of stimulants. When I did my Ayurvedic education, there were lots of stories from Western doctors. They were talking about sleep and anxiety, and they would go into these classes because nothing was helping their patients. Then they used cardamom and they’d come in the next day and be like, Oh, I did it and it helped my patients sleep. You know, that's insane. Because when you're in a holistic class, you all believe in it, but you don’t necessarily think that a Western doctor is going to come back and say something like that.
A lot of my clients have anxiety, so I'm always recommending it. I love it personally. Cardamom and milk, cold or warm or hot before bed. You can use the powder or you could use the pods. You put green pods in and you crack them slightly and then drain them out. But you can also use ground cardamom. If you’re making it and you’re really enjoying it, consider buying the seeds and cracking them open and then grinding the seeds. The smell is so different and you’re getting some of the oils and the benefits of that as well. Doing it yourself is a really beautiful thing. I fell in love again all over when I did it myself.
Green cardamom is more cooling and black cardamom is kind of smokier. I have this [shows a jar] from Burlap and Barrel, from a very small batch producer in India. This is completely different to the green fragrant cardamom. It’s naughty tasting. It’s smoky and heady. I sprinkle it on stuff and it adds this layer of flavor. I think that’s a nice thing to do with vegetable cooking. You can put it into beans and lentils to make them smokier or into vegetables, give them a bit of that edginess that you might get with grilled meats without having to actually burn them. It gives you that kind of taste. I’ve just discovered it and I was blown away by it.