A t a Lebanese restaurant in Delhi, two friends were undecided on which dessert to order. ‘All your desserts reek of rosewater,’ they complained to the chef from Beirut. This proved to be an insult to his Lebanese pride, so the chef shot back, ‘Like all Indian mithai is flavoured with elaichi.’
The Lebanese chef did have a point. Perhaps we Indians don’t realize how ubiquitous the use of cardamom is in our daily cuisine: From the countrywide favourite masala chai to pedas topped with a pinch of coarsely pounded black cardamom seeds, or the single spice note of green cardamom in most of Kerala’s sweets.
This isn’t surprising since green cardamom is endemic to Kerala’s uplands, and there is a school of thought that says it grew wild at one time. That was almost certainly the case for at least a millennium and during that time Arab traders landed on the Malabar Coast to trade in spices and made a temporary home in north Kerala, often marrying local women and setting up home.
For the better part of the last century, the cultivation of cardamom as a crop has taken place in the central Kerala district, generally in the hands of the Syrian Christian community. Why this is so is the subject of much conjecture, and there are several theories about it. One theory that I was told by almost every plantation owner I met is that when the British were constructing the Mullaperiyar dam in the 1800s, they needed plentiful labour. There was only one problem: The area was virtually devoid of any human habitation. They invited people from the neighbouring district of Pathanamthitta, which had an overwhelmingly large Christian population, perhaps with the promise of being granted tracts of land to settle in. And thus began the reign of the Syrian Christians as the growers of spice. Today they account for approximately 80 per cent of all growers. Only growers, mind. There are remarkably few members of the community who trade in the spice.
Rival theories, however, scoff at the idea of growers coming in as late as the 1800s. They claim that as early as the 13th and 14th centuries, Syrian Christians were appointed as port revenue officers by local rulers and given land to settle down in the spice-growing regions. But in the absence of reliable written records, it is impossible to trace this history conclusively.
Green cardamom flourishes in Kerala because the rain-lashed hillsides have provided the ideal growing conditions for millennia. Black cardamom, however, grows nowhere near Kerala, but there are some commonalities in their growth patterns. Both require hillsides rather than flat land, both grow on similar-sized shrubs, and require the protection of shade trees. Though the shrub is approximately as tall as a man, the spices grow from rhizomes near the root, which means painstaking squatting for hours on end, up and down hillsides, during harvest time. There are more commonalities. Both are air-dried in wood-fired ovens in the plantations themselves using the wood of the shade-giving trees. A poet might point out that having shaded the spice throughout its life, the shade tree then gives up its life to make its protégé a marketable commodity.
When the green cardamom plants are mature enough to bear fruit, they send out foot-long shoots that remain on the ground. The cardamom pods grow on alternate sides of the shoot and mature once every six weeks, throughout the year. That makes it seven times a year. There are more interesting details about the plant. The flower gives a hint of the pattern in which the cardamom pods emerge – alternately, on either side of the shoot. Hold a tiny white flower close enough and you will notice the maroon design on the inside of each petal – a shoot-like line, with striations appearing alternately, exactly the way the pods do on the shoot. It is just one of nature’s little tricks or enigmas and what makes the world of spice such an endlessly fascinating subject.
Similar to pepper, green cardamom grows in two contiguous states: Karnataka and Kerala. While Kerala has spice plantations where coffee and tea are also grown; upland Karnataka, mainly Coorg, has primarily coffee plantations and cardamom and pepper are cultivated alongside. Similar to the tea industry, which needs precise geographical and climatic conditions, as well as plentiful, cheap, highly-skilled labour, cardamom also needs labourers that have a high degree of expertise and efficiency. Fortunately for the Idukki district of Kerala – where cardamom and pepper grow, almost to the exclusion of any other crop, on rows of densely-forested hills – there is an endless supply of female workers from neighbouring Tamil Nadu, more precisely, from the Theni district, just seven kilometres away. At harvest time, busloads of women thread their way to the border post between the two states and clamber aboard plantation jeeps that will take them to work.
It is not comfortable working in a cardamom plantation. You have to assume a squatting position for eight hours a day, inching up or down a hillside on your haunches. Plucking cardamom is tricky too. You have to wait for the pods to turn from pale pink to yellow, and then commence picking. The only catch, however, is that not all the pods on a single stem ripen at the same time, so you cannot jerk the delicate stem for fear of spoiling the unripe ones.
The good ladies of Theni are able to work with speed, each collecting an average of 15 kilograms of pods a day. It seems to be a hereditary skill, because many, if not most, are third-generation cardamom pluckers, each working for the same plantation as their mothers and grandmothers did.
Travel around the Idukki district of Kerala and you’ll never be far from a cardamom plant. They’re ubiquitous, so the sight of their long, spiky leaves rising to man-height soon becomes a familiar one. If you visit the many spice plantations in the area – this is spice country, so there is little else besides plantations, many of them on the main road, and some even offering home-stays – you can see cardamom plants at close quarters.
That is exactly what I have in mind when I head to Green Park Ayurvedic and Spice Plantation. Hidden away near the village of Attapallam, this plantation offers a show garden where visitors are taken around by informed and highly educated staff members. My own guide – Noushad P.S. – has a college degree in biochemistry and makes the two-hour-long walk through spice fields an engrossing experience. He and owner Benny Joseph Muttathukunnel are the embodiment of that old cliché: be passionate about what you do. So, while Noushad sets off to climb a corral tree to try and fetch me a sample of unripe pepper, Joseph crawls on all fours around the cardamom plants to find a shoot that was beginning to bear flowers. ‘All the flowers will eventually grow into cardamoms,’ he says triumphantly as he comes back bearing a lone blossom with the trademark striations.
Joseph reckons that the Thekkady area must have around a hundred show gardens of varying sizes. Some, like his, are virtually classrooms for both children and adults to be exposed to the mystique of spices while they are still agricultural plants. Others are thinly veiled excuses to buy, buy, buy. However, if you do happen to get the short end of the stick, I would say that it is better to have visited a show garden to get up close and personal with spices on the tree, as it were, than to have stayed away from for fear of incessant requests to purchase armloads of pepper, cardamom and honey.
Despite the spice trade being so lucrative, Joseph tells me that older plantation families are struggling to maintain their ever-dwindling plantations. When settlers first began to come into the area, virgin forest land could be had for little or nothing and large families made sense since everyone needed to pull their weight and build a plantation. But today, long-drawn out inheritance battles among multiple stakeholders across generations has whittled down large parcels of land over and over again. Plus, the allure of office jobs, particularly overseas, has tempted many sons and grandsons of plantation owners to move away from the family business. This isn’t surprising to me. I personally know several people who possess valuable land in Kerala’s uplands, but who would rather slave away in some corporate job in Dubai or Delhi, while the homestead is trustingly left in the hands of old caretakers and retainers.
Not far from Green Park, in Thekaddy, is Elephant Junction, which represents one of the more unusual facets of a spice plantation. This 86-acre land was bought from the government over 72 years ago by owner Raju K.G.’s grandfather from the government. Since elephant dung makes an excellent fertilizer for cardamom plants, five elephants tramp up and down the path where cardamom grows, sometimes taking tourists for rides, sometimes not. It is clear that Raju loves elephants and it is his evident love for them that has made Elephant Junction the attraction that it has become. You can feed elephants and even have a bath with them (though how clean you will be after the bath is arguable!) During our hour-long ramble up the cardamom section, Raju’s voice is husky with emotion when he addresses the elephants. It is clear that they all reciprocate his sentiments, extending their trunks to sniff his palms and generally showing their affection for him.
The whole plantation is far too large to be covered on foot, so we decide to take Raju’s jeep. The quiet, self-effacing Raju, with his folded up mundu, looks anything but a reckless driver, but once we climb in, we careen up and down hillsides, up steep, stony slopes at top speed to get to the upper reaches of the plantation where nutmeg, cloves and coffee are cultivated. We finally stop in front of an ancient structure that is now used as a storage barn. Inside, I am taken to the original chamber for cardamom drying. It looks, not unnaturally, like a large oven of the size you might see in a commercial bakery. The stout metal door would look more at place at a bank than in a spice plantation. Cardamoms that have been plucked need to be spread out on a net in a dry spot in the shade at 50o C for the first 12 hours. After that, into the oven they go, where, for the next 12 hours, they are subjected to 100o C heat, or until a crop of say, 200 kilograms is reduced to a mere 40 kilograms. It is why the price of green cardamom is so high.
If you want a good price on your cardamom crop, it has to make the grade. Cardamoms are graded according to size. However, it’s not length that is counted but the width. The fattest cardamom pods measure 8 mm around and have the most seeds in them – between 26 to 28; the size after that has 22 to 24, and the smallest, puniest size, around 5 mm or less, contains anything between 18 to 20 seeds. Though there is no difference in taste between the best and the ‘worst’, the best quality commands a premium because you would have to use proportionately fewer pods than if you choose from the opposite end of the scale. The brighter green the skin and the fatter the outline, the costlier the spice. Cardamoms with open skins don’t make the grade: they have been picked too late. Those with white skins have been artificially bleached to be in keeping with the vogue of a bygone era that now, fortunately, has passed.
Nature has endowed both the skin and the seeds of the green cardamom with slightly different flavour profiles. The skin is earthy and fresh with sweet tones while the seeds are distinctly lemony and have a menthol-like coolness about them. That accounts for why their most popular use is as a breath freshener all over India; cardamom seeds coated with silver leaf are as sophisticated an after-dinner mint as any. Cardamom is also used to soothe a sore throat, gum infections, lung infections and even as an anti-depressant. It is also used in tea mixes, most famously in masala chai across the country. And while hardly any Indian would be brave enough to drink coffee scented with cardamom, in the Arab world, few people would think of drinking coffee – called qawah – without it.
Although green cardamom is endemic to the Kerala highlands, it is now being cultivated in countries as far apart as Guatemala, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea, Tanzania, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Cardamom was introduced to Guatemala in the 1920s, and in less than a century, it has overtaken India as the world’s major producer. A kind friend from London once presented me with a packet of Guatemalan cardamoms, telling me that she used no other kind in her biryani, which was the toast of the town. I was initially wary, but was soon impressed by the rich green colour of the shell and the punch of flavour that a single pod imparted to the rogan josh I cooked. Even accounting for the difference in quality of the spice one can buy in India versus London, there’s a lesson to be learnt from Guatemalan cardamom. It reminded me of the tagline of the advertisement for a car rental company: When you’re number two, you try harder . Or else . Guatemalan cardamom has a history that is much shorter than that of Kerala’s crop, but the ease with which the quality has overtaken ours shows that provenance or antiquity alone cannot be a factor in growing spices.
On the other hand, Thai and Java cardamom can hardly be used as a substitute for green cardamom because of the vast difference in flavour. In fact, the first time I bit into Thai cardamom, I was not able to identify it as cardamom at all! The colour of the skin looked yellowish and the cross section of both varieties was round rather than triangular. Thai cardamom, I learnt, is used in the extreme south of the country, to make the paste for massaman curry.
While the uplands around Thekkady specialize in growing green cardamom in plantations that are carefully tended and shaded by cinnamon and nutmeg, or silver oak and jackfruit, with almost no endemic species of trees, black cardamom is perhaps the only spice in the country that is grown in otherwise natural forests. All the shade trees on black cardamom plantations are those that are endemic to Sikkim.
In fact, two more divergent approaches to spice growing could not have been imagined than the cultivation of green and black cardamom. While Kerala’s plantations are mostly family owned, and tend to have a hands-on approach to spice cultivation, Sikkimese plantations are mostly owned by aristocrats who delegate the job of plucking and drying cardamom to, primarily Nepali, workers. Additionally, the Sikkimese almost never cook with black cardamom and are seemingly indifferent to its presence on the landscape. On the other hand, central Kerala’s cuisine is scarcely identifiable without the presence of green cardamom and black pepper.
Nowhere was this point brought home to me more closely than on my first visit to Gangtok. It is the only place in India where black cardamom is grown, if you don’t consider Darjeeling, which accounts for only a minuscule amount – less than one-tenth of Sikkim’s crop. Yet, practically no one in Sikkim actually uses it in cooking: Not the Lepchas, not the Bhutias, not the Nepalis and not the Bengalis – the four communities that more or less make up the population. Neither is it available in the markets of Gangtok in any significant quantity.
K.T. Gyaltsen, a bureaucrat in the state government, and one of the indigenous Lepchas who constitute around 20 per cent of the total population, admits that he’s never given the puzzle of black cardamom much thought. This is in spite of the fact that it is with cardamom money that most members of his extended family have been educated. Gyaltsen belongs to the aristocratic class of Sikkim, called kazi (they have nothing to do with Muslims who have studied jurisprudence, also called kazis), who have traditionally held large landholdings, and it is the produce of their land that has underwritten the public school and prestigious college education of families like Gyaltsen’s.
And what, pray is the produce of these lands? The single most important commodity is, undoubtedly, black cardamom. Gyaltsen drives me to Tashi View Point, a must-see on the itinerary of most tourists. However, we are not going to have our picture taken while wearing furry hats and silk robes as the other tourists are; Gyaltsen merely wants to give me a sense of cardamom country. ‘This,’ he says with a sweep of his arm, ‘is north of Gangtok. Can you see how densely forested the hills are? It is where cardamom grows.’ We are standing on the most picturesque spot of real estate in the entire state, and a phalanx of tourists is eagerly immortalizing the scene wearing local garb. ‘Now look towards the east. See how the landscape changes. All you can see are terraced rice fields. There’s little cardamom there.’
Drive to Gangtok from the nearest airport at Bagdogra and you’ll notice how fields give way to sal forests and then gradually to dense, mixed deciduous forests as you approach the border of Sikkim. Tiny as the state is – a mere 115 km in length and 65 km in width – Sikkim is divided into north, south, east and west, and it is only the southern half of the state where black cardamom grows.
In the few days of my stay in Gangtok, Gyaltsen’s entire family tries to pitch in to help piece together the black-cardamom puzzle. This involves visiting a bunch of relatives, all unfailingly charming and gracious hosts, who keep impeccable tables. I enjoy steamed bamboo shoot with fresh yak cheese and flavourful, homely nettle soup, but there’s not much in the way of enlightenment about black cardamom.
I do learn, however, that black cardamom is not planted as extensively as, say, green cardamom is in Kerala. It is just one of the many plants that form the undergrowth in the forest. Earlier the Lepchas gathered it from the forests to sell. Over time, they started cultivation to adapt to optimum elevation, water availability and frost conditions. The plant requires a shade tree to protect it from direct sunlight, and nature has provided the perfect solution: the Himalayan alder (Alnus nepalensis ) which not only provides shade throughout the year, but also makes sure that valuable nitrogen does not get leached from the soil.
Because all of Sikkim is mountainous – the little state veers from subtropical to permanent snow – there is a virtual absence of flat land on which to practice agriculture. Rice and other cereals are grown on terraced hillsides, but that – as well as rampant building activity in the capital Gangtok – predisposes the land towards crippling landslides. So it is agro-forestry that is a perfect solution for Sikkim. In a single solution, trees in the forests are left untouched, and some undergrowth is cleared, but only to make way for black cardamom plants. There, in the midst of kilometres of hillsides, I spot the now-familiar black cardamom plants, dwarfed by deciduous trees. Shoots bear a fist-sized receptacle in the shape of a pine cone. Each receptacle contains around half-a-dozen pods of black cardamom. During harvest time, which is once a year from October onwards, the whole receptacle is removed so that individual pods can be separated later. Each large plantation owner has a drying chamber on his land. To help fire these up, branches of Himalayan alder are burnt; in a few months’ time they will have grown back.
Part of the smoky taste of black cardamom comes from the hours it spends in the drying chamber: Certainly, when I bit into a seed that was picked straight off the plant, it had a sharper, slightly acidic flavour to it. It didn’t even have the gnarled, somewhat pre-historic appearance that black cardamom gets after a stint in the drying chamber where it acquires its trademark charred eucalyptus undertone, with an undeniable sweetness in the finish.
The most intriguing part of Sikkim’s odd relationship with this spice is the connection between black cardamom and the Marwaris who trade in it. My Sikkimese friends tell me that Marwaris from Kolkata migrated to Sikkim for the express purpose of buying and selling the spice. I am given directions to the shops-cum-godowns of a couple of Marwari traders near M.G. Road, as ‘un-Indian’ a road as I have ever come across: tiled pavements, no traffic, only benches, fountains and shops that have stood here for decades. On the far side of M.G. Road is a row of far smaller, less impressive shops that act as grocers-cum-wholesalers of black cardamom.
As I walk into virtually every one of the twenty-odd shops selling singularly unlovely blocks of washing soap and an assortment of dals, I enquire about black cardamom. Invariably, the shopkeeper calls out to the youngest boy in the shop who then climbs like a monkey on to sacks of rice and dal, perches his foot on a shelf of Maggi noodles or MDH Masalas, stretches himself with an almighty effort to the very top of the shop and, from just below the ceiling, brings down a dusty packet of black cardamom. The packets are never larger than 500 grams and they are never in mint condition, so I am not tempted to buy them.
Clearly black cardamom is seldom sought in Gangtok’s shops, even by tourists. I find it extremely strange to see how easy it is to buy panch phoran, in deference to the number of Bengalis that live in or visit Gangtok on long weekends, but how difficult it is to come by the produce of the land. In Jammu’s Raghunath Bazar, by comparison, every tourist worth his salt buys at least one kilo of raajma, which is the local produce. And in Kashmir, tourists go in search of saffron, its price notwithstanding. So why the hesitation in Gangtok? I wish I knew the answer.
Far away from Sikkim, in Punjab, however, you’ll find a stash of black cardamom in every kitchen. It has a digestive quality, which is why it is used in garam masalas and many whole dals which are heavy on the stomach. According to tradition, in every Punjabi household when there is a newborn baby, a jug of water in which black cardamom has been boiled steadily is given to the mother to drink. The belief is that this helps to flush out the toxins from their body; and the baby is not prone to colic because of the digestive nature of black cardamom. Old-fashioned barfi and pedas, too, are invariably topped with a sprinkling of coarsely crushed black cardamom seeds.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, in Kerala, there is no use at all of black cardamom among the community that owns plantations of aromatic spices: the Syrian Christians. That is understandable because no black cardamom grows in Kerala. What little black cardamom is used in the state is mainly by the Muslims, in the form of garam masalas for mutton preparations and biryanis. Abida Rashid, a Kozhikode-based authority on Muslim cooking, tells me of an intriguing warm drink for the breaking of the daily fast during the month of Ramadan. It is made from roasted semolina and fried shallots and flavoured with black cardamom.
For me, black cardamom has never held any personal appeal. This is probably because, as a teenager, I overheard a conversation in Goa between the owner of the local Punjabi restaurant and a customer who was obviously from Delhi. The restaurateur was recounting that the first time a Goan customer walked in, he ordered a dal and then raised the roof about what he thought was a dead cockroach. It turned out that it was a black cardamom, but young and impressionable as I was, the connection between cockroaches and the spice was irrevocably made in my mind.
A chef of a well-known group of hotels reiterates the appearance of black cardamom to cockroaches. Apparently, at the chain of hotels in which he works, there’s a standing instruction that black cardamom is only to be added to food in its ground form. On several occasions, Western guests mistook whole black cardamom for cockroaches and complained so bitterly (and noisily) that the instruction is now immutable.
Over the years, I’ve never been tempted to change my mind about this spice. The pungent, incipient sweetness of black cardamom has (to my palate) always overpowered every other spice it shares a dish with. In my in-laws’ kitchen, it goes into every single preparation, including those where only one aromatic spice is required. Though I am biased against it, I will say that it is not an inferior or coarser version of green cardamom, but an altogether different spice and has to be treated as such.
PAPUTTU
Kaveri Ponnapa has a most beautiful blog that celebrates the cuisine of her beloved Coorg as intertwined with the culture and lifestyle. She is the author of the only definitive book on the Kodavas, The Vanishing Kodavas , and writes about the food of her community for several publications.
INGREDIENTS
• 1 cup tari*
• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup water
• Seeds from 1 pod of green cardamom, very lightly crushed
• ¼ tsp salt
• ¼ cup or less coconut, freshly grated
METHOD
• Soak the tari in water and milk, with the grated coconut for an hour.
• Next, add the salt, sugar and cardamom, and squeeze the coconut in the liquid gently by hand, until it releases milk, and the mixture becomes creamy.
• Prepare a steamer, bringing the water to a boil. (You can also cook the puttu in a pressure cooker, without the weight, in case you don’t have a steamer. Make sure you place the puttu on a stand above the boiling water.)
• Pour into a shallow enamel plate approx 8½ inch in diameter, 1½ inch in depth.
• Place the plate in the steamer, close the lid and cook on medium to high heat for about 15–20 minutes, until done.
• To turn out, allow the plate to cool a little, then place your palm on the base, and slam down firmly on to a cloth spread on the kitchen counter. Cut into 8 wedge-shaped slices. Puttus should be firm to the touch, soft but not mushy, and a delicate scent of cardamom should rise from them.
*Note: Tari is short-grain rice that is washed, dried and pounded. It’s possible to make this at home by washing, drying and pulsing the rice in a food processor. Take care to sieve out any powder, and retain only the bigger pieces of rice. Rice rava is not an appropriate substitute. Paputtu is traditionally eaten with mutton curry.
NADIYAH AKRAM’S PANI POL (COCONUT CREPES) WITH GREEN CARDAMOM
This recipe is simple, quick and filling.
• 2 cups coconut, freshly scraped or desiccated
• 1 cup kithul jaggery, scraped/crushed
• 3 whole green cardamoms, lightly bruised
• Sugar, to taste (in case jaggery is not sweet enough)
METHOD
• Melt the jaggery in a pot over the stove on a low flame with the cardamom.
• Once the jaggery has dissolved, fish out all cardamom pieces and remnants.
• Add the scraped coconut to the warm jaggery syrup and stir rapidly over a low flame for a minute. Remove from heat and allow to cool.
• Make paper thin crepes using a batter of eggs, flour and milk and roll with pol pani filling.
GAWALMANDI KA KAHIRA
Chef Dirham ul Haque is the shining star in the firmament of The Oberoi Group. He specializes in Mughlai food and though many of his recipes are too complicated for the hobby cook, this rice-based dessert is guaranteed to yield perfect results.
INGREDIENTS
• 200 g basmati rice
• 2 l full-cream milk
• 250 g sugar
• 250 g danedar (granular) khoya
• 10 green cardamoms
• 3½ tbsp almond slivers
METHOD
• Soak rice in water for an hour.
• Gently roast the cardamom; make a fine powder of it.
• In a heavy-bottomed copper vessel, simmer the milk for 30 minutes on low heat with the cardamom powder, add sugar and grated khoya.
• Cook till the milk reduces to half its volume.
• Add rice and cook it for 30 minutes, stirring constantly.
• Set in earthenware moulds. Refrigerate; garnish with almond slivers.
CHEF RANVEER BRAR’S CASHEW NUT ‘HOLLANDAISE’ WITH BLACK CARDAMOM
INGREDIENTS
• 200 g unroasted cashew nuts (broken ones are a good option)
• ½ tsp black cardamom seeds, pounded
• Approximately one cup neutral-tasting oil, such as rice bran oil
METHOD
• Wash the cashew nuts in running water to remove any grit or inclusions/salt. Soak for at least 8 hours. Drain.
• Place the cashew nuts in a wet grinder and blitz till you are left with a paste. Slowly add in the oil, drop by drop, while the mixture is being blended at high speed.
• When it becomes stiff enough that it can be turned upside down safely, it is done.
• Sprinkle over with the black cardamom powder and fold in well.
Note: This can be used as a topping for canapes, as part of a filling for sandwiches, as a dip or even in a seafood dish that has to be gratinated.
Jawalamukhi – the part of Himachal where my college friend Rashmi lives – has a mithai shop that makes mithai in the old-fashioned way. Hence, black cardamom is still used, albeit the price keeps shooting northwards! The mithai maker has kindly given Rashmi his recipe.
INGREDIENTS
• 500 g khoya
• ½ cup sugar
• 1 tsp milk
• 2 tbsp ghee
• ¼ cup water
• Seeds of 10 black cardamoms, a few reserved for garnish
METHOD
• Sauté the khoya in a pan on medium heat, stirring continuously for 10 minutes. If it begins to stick to the bottom of the pan, add a few drops of ghee at a time and keep stirring till the colour changes to golden brown.
• Take the pan off the heat and set aside to cool. In another pan, cook the sugar with the water on medium heat.
• Add half the cardamom seeds, coarsely broken in a mortar and pestle.
• Stir till the sugar dissolves and the mixture becomes syrupy.
• Take the pan off the heat and add the khoya mixture to the sugar syrup, mixing well.
• Now, divide the mixture into flattened balls of equal size and shape. Use your palms for this, after applying a bit of ghee.
• Press the remaining cardamom seeds into the pedas. You may coarsely pound them before-hand, so that you have some almost whole and others almost powdered.