Caraway seeds

I have been reminded that I am rather fond of caraway seeds. As can be found in seed cakes, cup cakes, kidneys, kabanosi and bread. A fondness which dates back at least to the early 1970's when I consumed quite a lot of kabanosi and quite a lot of seed cake, the latter of home manufacture. There may have been caraway seed flavoured cup cakes in the big family teas which once took place on Sunday afternoons.

Reminded by the appearance of a white bloomer flavoured with caraway seeds from Brick Lane. Proper white bread of a quality which is quite hard to find these days. Very good it was too.

We wondered about what a caraway tree looked like and turned up Wikipedia to find that it is not a tree at all, rather a member of the Apiaceae family, a large family which includes celery, carrots, parsley - and the anise used to flavour alcoholic drinks, some of which I am also quite fond of. Indeed, it seems that most members of the family have distinctive smells. Some large, but no trees that I could see.

I next wondered about how to describe the taste, and more or less drew a blank, apart from agreeing with the suggestion that there was a hint of aniseed about caraway. From where I associated to the habit of wine buffs of describing the tastes and flavours of wine in fruity terms - which I have never understood or connected with at all. It may well be that there are ten basic tastes from which every other taste can be manufactured, and that on this basis sauvignon blanc is quite like grapefruit, but knowing this does nothing for my taste of the former. It still tastes nothing like grapefruit.

But there may be a sex angle, in that BH has something of an aversion to caraway, an aversion dating back to caraway induced nausea during pregnancy. But she has been very good about it, tolerating without fuss my adding caraway seeds to kidneys for the five years or so that I was doing that.

Final factlet. Around a third of the world's caraway seeds are grown in Finland.

PS: a lot of people go in for five basic tastes, rather than ten. Sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. With this last having been invented in Japan and being associated with the now pervasive monosodium glutamate. Note that spicy is a pain/temperature sensation which does not involve the taste buds, so while it is certainly a sensation involved with food it is not, properly speaking a taste. On which see reference 3.

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=caraway for caraways past. But nothing on psm2 and little on psm3.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caraway.

Reference 3: This is your brain on capsaicin - Tirado-Lee, Leidamarie - 2014.

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