Seremna Black Cardamom (Hee Gaon)

Black cardamom is not a bigger version of green cardamom. Green is Elettaria cardamomum — floral, sweet, at home in desserts. Black is Amomum subulatum — a larger, ridged, leathery pod that tastes of resin and warmth and belongs in slow-cooked, savoury food. Swapping one for the other does not give you a variation. It gives you a mistake.

Seremna is the cultivar, and it has an unusually short and traceable history. In 1982 the late Sukh Ram Subba, a grower in Hee Gaon in West Sikkim, identified it as something distinct and worth keeping. He raised saplings from it and pressed his neighbours to plant it, and from 1985 growers took it up in numbers. The name comes from a Limboo word for drooping leaves. Roughly nine of every ten Seremna pods grown anywhere still come from Hee Gaon and the villages immediately around it.

The village sits at 1,200 – 1,350 metres, bounded by the Hee river to the west, the Kalez to the north, the Rangeet to the east and the Sarndong reserve forest to the south, and takes 3,000 – 4,000 millimetres of rain a year. The plant wants shade rather than sun, and that shade is managed with utis, the Himalayan alder, on steep contour terraces. It is a smallholding crop — a few clumps per family.

About the smoke. The capsules are cured over a wood fire in a bhatti, a kiln the farmers build themselves. But the Hee Gaon growers deliberately burn dry wood, precisely to keep the smoke down — heavy smoke costs the capsule its colour and its aroma. The fire is there to dry, not to flavour. What you should taste is resin and warmth carrying a trace of woodsmoke, not a bonfire.

Seremna cures faster than other large cardamoms because its husk is thin, and left too long the capsules split. That thin rind has a second consequence the growers prize: the calyx — the little tail that on other cultivars has to be cut off with scissors — falls away by itself during curing. Bigger dried capsules, 65 to 70 seeds inside, thin husk, no tail to trim.

In the kitchen. Crack the pod before it goes into a biryani, a dal or a garam masala. Whole and unbruised it will sit in the pot and give you almost nothing. Take it out before serving; it is not meant to be eaten.