Caraway

Caraway, Carum carvi, is a biennial of the carrot family grown for its warm, sharp seeds, long used in bread, cheese and cordials across Europe and the Near East. It is one of the oldest of cultivated spices, its seeds found in ancient settlements. Its most distinctive folklore is a single persistent theme: caraway was held to confer retention, preventing the theft or loss of any object that contained it, and stopping any person or creature that ate it from wandering away.

Caraway seed cake was, in rural England, the traditional reward baked for farmworkers once the spring sowing was finished, a harvest custom old enough that Shakespeare has Justice Shallow offer Falstaff a pippin and a dish of caraways in Henry IV, Part 2, and the plain seed cake remained a fixture of English baking into the twentieth century. The same seeds flavour rye bread across Germany, Austria and Scandinavia and the spirits kummel and aquavit, so that a plant valued in magic chiefly for making things stay put has, in the kitchen, travelled unusually widely. Its two-year growing cycle, seed sown in one year and the aromatic crop harvested only in the next, gave rural households a long, patient wait before the first cake or loaf could be made from a given sowing.

Culpeper placed caraway under Mercury, the planet of the mind and of communication. Its folk reputation for fixing and holding gave it a wide use in domestic charm: caraway was baked into bread and mixed into the feed of pigeons and poultry to keep them homing to the loft; it was put in a lover's pocket to guard against inconstancy, and slipped among a child's things to prevent them being spirited away. Chewed caraway seeds after a meal were also a homely remedy for the digestion, a use given here as history. The plant's whole symbolism grows from one idea, keeping what one has, attached, for reasons now obscure, to a common kitchen seed.

Modern herbal medicine still classifies caraway among the carminative herbs, seeds chewed or infused to ease trapped wind and mild indigestion after a heavy meal, a use directly continuous with the old folk practice and one of the few pieces of caraway lore with any real pharmacological plausibility, its essential oil having a mild antispasmodic action on the gut shown in laboratory studies, though it remains a mild kitchen remedy rather than a treatment for serious complaint. Caraway seeds have also been recovered from Mesolithic sites in northern Europe, showing the plant was gathered by hunter-gatherer peoples millennia before its later cultivation and its later reputation for fixing fortune in place.