Cardamom EO
Origin: Guatemala

• Details and product description

  Introduction:

  Herbaceous plant with long rhizomes that resembles a reed. Clasping lanceolate leaves 50 cm in length and 5 cm wide. Very lovely greenish white flowers with purple markings that grow in long clusters. Grayish green fruit shaped like small ovoid capsules with 3 sections containing numerous green and brown angular seeds that are very aromatic. The green, brown and white seeds are commercial quality. The green seeds have the most powerful and most valued fragrance. White seeds are green seeds that have been whitened after processing.

  History:

  Cardamom is one of the world’s most ancient spices and the third most expensive after saffron and vanilla. Cardamom has been well known since ancient times, the Egyptians used it in perfumes and incense and chewed it to whiten their teeth. The fruit has been used for a very long time for its carminative, stimulant and aromatic properties: 4000 BC: Cardamom was the most prized gift that one could offer to the gods in the Middle East. 4th century BC: Use in Ayurvedic medicine. 2nd century BC: Rome imported large quantities of cardamom coming from India via Alexandria. 8th century: The Indian author Susruta refers to it in his works using the Sanskrit name for cardamom. 1154: Edrisi indicates that Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka) is the origin of cardamom. 1514: Barbosa, a Portuguese traveler, identified cardamom on the Malabar Coast. 1563: Garcia da Orta records that a grand variety (grand cardamom or Ceylan cardamom) was produced in Ceylon. In the Middle Ages, it played a significant role as an ingredient in an elixir of life made by Matthiole, a Sienese doctor during the Renaissance. Most of the worldwide production of cardamom seeds is used to flavor coffee in Arab countries. Cardamom like small cardamom, was one of the many components in the snakebite ointment found in the 18th-century Western maritime pharmacopoeia  

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