I sometimes really miss living in the city: I love take-out ethnic foods. I am a great fan of Chinese, Thai, and Indian cuisine and I miss letting my fingers do the walking for supper. I have tried duplicating various ethnic foods—heaven knows my spice cupboard is evidence of that—but it just isn’t the same.

Why is that? Is it that we usually make do with what is easiest to find, skipping the lemon grass or fresh shitake mushrooms; substituting celery for bok choy, because purchasing the number of ingredients required and the time to prep them all is just too burdensome? Not to mention the enorma-stove, wheelbarrow sized wok, and the ten dishwashers necessary to carry-out the job!

Is it because we tend to be a bit hypocritical when it comes to eating healthy: if we can’t see what goes in it, we can convince ourselves that all those fried vegetables in salty, starchy sauces are good for us. We would never cook like that at home! Fear of deep-frying and the unpleasant lingering odour of dead fried food in the house is enough to deter most of us.

Perhaps it is simply because we are using recipes geared to the typical North American market where you aren’t going to find every authentic ingredient, deleting a spice which might well turn out to be the defining flavour for a particular dish.

What is it exactly? Why is it so hard to duplicate take-out ethnic foods at home?

That is why recently, I was thrilled to find ajowan at Fairway Market in Nanaimo. Along with nigella —haven’t found that one yet—cardamom, and fenugreek, it is one of the quintessential Indian spices.

Ajowan (also ajwain or carom) is a tiny seed of the parsley family, a close cousin to cumin and caraway.  North American recipes often substitute cumin or thyme for this “elusive” seed, but if you can find it in Nanaimo, it can’t be that elusive! (If you have never spent any time browsing the aisles of Fairway Market, you are missing all sorts of hard-to-come-by ingredients, exotic vegetables, and at least 15 different brands of coconut milk.)

Ajowan is native to the eastern Mediterranean countries and India, but it is India that is the principal user of the seed, largely in their many vegetarian dishes.

The seeds,  which look like cumin or caraway, surprisingly have the flavour of thyme—at most, only a third or fourth cousin—only more intense, with a bitter although not unpleasant after bite and an astringent tang that can actually leave your tongue numb when chewed.

In Indian cuisine, the seed is usually crushed in a mortar and then fried in butter or ghee to make an aromatic butter sauce used to flavour vegetable and bean dishes. In my haste to use my new purchase, I generously coated marinated chicken breasts with the whole seeds, and baked. It was a bit “woody” and I spent the better part of the evening picking splinters out of my teeth, but it tasted fabulous and the smell it left in the house was positively aromatherapeutic.

It is not surprising to find ajowan used in starchy and bean-filled dishes, as it is well-known for its medicinal attributes, one of the chief being its ability to reduce flatulence. Indians will chew on the seeds after a meal to aid in digestion or it can be brewed into tea to treat colic and diarrhea. It also has important germicidal and fungicidal properties.

The active ingredient in ajowan is Thymol. This essential oil was first discovered in thyme, but is actually far more concentrated in ajowan, which is now the chief commercial source for this powerful antiseptic. It is used in medicines to treat sore throats and coughs, and as an anti-fungal agent.

Ajowan is used in Indian bread recipes such as naan or paratha, deep-fried fritters called pakora, and most prominently, in dhal, a very spicy dish of pureed lentils or other beans. You will also find many Indian pickle recipes use ajowan. As with other pickling and preservative spices like coriander, dill, and fennel, the preservative quality of ajowan likely came first; the lovely flavour it imparted was merely happenstance. In the land before Tums and refrigeration, preserving food was more of an issue than taste.

If you make one thing with ajowan this summer, let it be berbere, which is not an Indian dish. Berbere is an Ethiopian spice blend that is used in stews and soups and as a preservative for meats. It isn’t too surprising that a traditional Ethiopian recipe should contain ajowan, as their culture is very much a mixture of Arabic and Indian.  

It is hot, so go easy at first; the traditional recipe calls for ten dried chilies. In a cast iron frying pan, roast the red chilies (seeded, unless you have a death wish), black peppercorns, ground ginger, whole cloves, coriander seed, ajowan, allspice berries, green cardamom seeds, fenugreek, and a cinnamon stick. You really don’t want to use your coffee grinder for this potent mixture, although, come to think of it, a few coffee beans could add some smooth smokiness. In just one recipe, you have used at least five of those rarely-used spices in your pantry. (I have got to start labelling my spice jars better!)

As for take-out, I had another thought. What if you put all your homemade Chinese or Indian dishes into cardboard containers, put these into brown paper bags, and drove around the island a few times until they were sufficiently leaking, verging on lukewarm, and had acquired just the right amount of Essence de Cardboard.

Maybe that’s the key, indefinable ingredient for great take-out food!