Cardamom

Cardamom in a European sausage recipe means green cardamom, the pod of Elettaria cardamomum, and it is used in quantities that surprise people who know it from baking. Its role in the fine cooked sausages is to sit under the nutmeg, mace and white pepper and add a cool, faintly eucalyptus lift that nobody in the room will identify. That is a good spice doing its job.

The two cardamoms are worth separating. Green cardamom is sweet, floral and cool, dominated by cineole and terpinyl acetate. Black cardamom, Amomum subulatum, is a different genus, larger, and dried over open fire so that it is heavily smoky and camphorous. It belongs in Indian and Chinese cooking and would overwhelm a Bratwurst. A recipe that says cardamom without qualification, in a European charcuterie context, means green.

The pod is not the spice. The papery green husk carries little flavour and a good deal of vegetal bitterness; the aroma is in the small black seeds inside. Traditional practice is to crack the pods, discard the husks and grind the seeds fresh. Pre-ground cardamom is usually the whole pod ground together, which is both weaker and slightly bitter, and it stales exceptionally fast because the volatiles that make cardamom worth having are the first to leave. Where a recipe gives a weight for cardamom it almost always means the seed, not the pod, and the difference is roughly threefold.

In charcuterie it belongs to the German, Austrian and Scandinavian traditions: the Brühwurst family, the Weisswurst, the Leberwurst styles, Swedish and Danish sausages, and the Christmas products. It appears in the sweet-spiced Chinese cured sausages. It is largely absent from the Italian, Spanish and French sausage families.

Doses are among the smallest in the cupboard, typically 0.1 to 0.5 g per kilo of meat of ground seed. Like clove and mace, it turns soapy and perfumed at the top of its range, and the pleasant window is narrow.