Somewhere in the misty Western Ghats of Karnataka — maybe 200 kilometres from where you're sitting right now — cardamom grows wild in the shade of towering trees, nourished by monsoon rains and volcanic soil. It has grown there for thousands of years. Ancient Sanskrit texts from around 3000 BC list it as an offering to be poured into sacred fires during wedding ceremonies.
Five thousand kilometres north, in a Swedish kitchen, a woman cracks open a cardamom pod and kneads the seeds into butter-enriched dough. She's making kanelbullar. She'll do this every week until she dies, as her mother did, and her grandmother before that.
How did a spice from the hills above Bangalore become the soul of Scandinavian baking? The answer involves Vikings, pirates, a sunken ship, and a 5,000-year-old supply chain.
The Queen of Spices: Born in Your Backyard
Cardamom — Elettaria cardamomum — is native to the Western Ghats of southern India. Not broadly tropical Asia. Not "somewhere in the East." Specifically the evergreen forests of Kerala, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu. There's even a mountain range named after it: the Cardamom Hills, rising through Idukki district in Kerala and stretching into the highlands of Karnataka.
If you're in Bangalore, this is practically your backyard spice.
Known as the "Queen of Spices" (black pepper being the King), cardamom was one of the most prized substances in the ancient world. It appears in Ayurvedic medicine as a digestive aid and detoxifying agent. The Greek physician Dioscorides prescribed it. The Roman cookbook Apicius — from the 1st century AD — used it generously. Persian and Arabian medical texts categorised different grades and sizes with scholarly precision.
But for centuries, the people buying it had no idea where it actually came from. Arab traders who controlled the supply routes deliberately kept the origins secret, allowing myths to flourish. The Roman historian Pliny believed cardamom grew in Arabia. Consumers in medieval Europe thought it came from mysterious lands guarded by serpents and mythical birds. This mystery kept prices astronomical — and the traders very, very wealthy.
How Cardamom Reached Scandinavia (It Wasn't the Vikings)
The popular story goes like this: Vikings discovered cardamom in the bazaars of Constantinople around the 11th century and brought it home to Scandinavia. It's a good story. It might even be partly true. But culinary archaeologist Daniel Serra, in his book An Early Meal — A Viking Age Cookbook & Culinary Odyssey, calls this "unlikely" due to a complete lack of evidence.
Serra's research points to a different route. The earliest Scandinavian recipes containing cardamom appear in a 13th-century Danish cookbook written by a monk — and they're nearly identical to Moorish recipes from the same period. His theory: cardamom travelled from India to the Arab world, then to the Moorish kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal), up to London, and from there through the Hanseatic trade network — the powerful medieval trading league — into Scandinavia.
Archaeological evidence supports this. Botanist Alexandra Livarda's archaeobotanical studies found five separate samples of green cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum) in Northwestern European sites dating to Roman and medieval periods.
But here's Serra's most fascinating observation: Scandinavia, being on the geographic fringes of Europe, clung to medieval culinary traditions far longer than the rest of the continent. While France and Italy moved on to new flavour profiles during the Renaissance, Scandinavians kept cooking with the same medieval spice palette — cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, saffron — that had defined European luxury cuisine for centuries.
In other words, Sweden didn't adopt cardamom because it was trendy. Sweden kept cardamom because everyone else forgot about it.
The Swedish East India Company: Pirates, Silver, and Spice
The story gets wilder in the 18th century.
In 1731, the Svenska Ostindiska Companiet (Swedish East India Company, or SOIC) was founded in Gothenburg — a full century after the Dutch and British had established theirs. The founding involved a Scottish merchant named Colin Campbell, a Swedish nobleman, and — in one early iteration — actual pirates who offered King Charles XII sixty armed ships if they could settle in Gothenburg and trade under the Swedish flag.
The SOIC traded primarily with China (tea accounted for 90% of cargo value), but it also sent ships to Surat in India, returning with spices, textiles, and precious stones. One voyage to Surat yielded a profit of 103%. The British and Dutch, who controlled most Indian trade, were furious and did everything possible to sabotage Swedish operations — the first SOIC ship was seized by the Dutch, and the second was destroyed by the British and French.
The most famous SOIC vessel, the Götheborg, sank in Gothenburg harbour in 1745 after successfully completing a China voyage. It was carrying tea, porcelain, silk, and spices. When the wreck was excavated in the 1980s, they found over 400 tonnes of cargo — a time capsule of the trade that shaped Swedish culinary identity.
Through the SOIC and broader European trade networks, spices like cardamom became increasingly accessible and affordable in Sweden. By the 1800s, what had once been a fantastically expensive luxury was cheap enough to use in everyday home baking. Cardamom went from royal banquet ingredient to Tuesday afternoon dough.
Sweden Today: 60 Times More Cardamom Than America
The numbers are staggering. Sweden consumes 60 times more cardamom per capita than the United States and 18 times more than the global average. In 2023, Sweden imported 223 tonnes of cardamom worth €2.5 million — representing nearly 6.2% of all European cardamom imports, from a country of just 10 million people.
Cardamom is in everything. It's in the dough of every kanelbulle and kardemummabulle. It's in glögg (Swedish mulled wine). It's in lussekattor (saffron buns served on Lucia Day). It's in rice pudding, stewed fruits, and Christmas cookies. It's the baseline flavour of Swedish baking the way vanilla is for American baking or ghee is for Indian cooking.
Ask a Swede to describe the smell of their childhood kitchen, and they'll describe cardamom. Ask them to name the flavour that means "home," and it's cardamom. It's Sweden's Proustian madeleine — except instead of a memory, it triggers an urge to put the kettle on.
The Beautiful Irony: Where India and Sweden Meet
Here's what makes the FIKA B'LORE story genuinely poetic.
Cardamom was born in the hills of Karnataka. It travelled through ancient trade routes — Arab merchants, Moorish kitchens, Hanseatic ships, the Swedish East India Company — to become the defining flavour of Swedish baking. Over centuries and thousands of kilometres, it was transformed from an Indian spice into a Scandinavian staple.
And now, two Swedes have brought it back.
Dennis and Niklas started FIKA B'LORE to bring authentic Swedish fika to Bangalore — and every morning at our solar-powered Fika Farm, baker Leanne rolls cardamom into the same dough that Swedish grandmothers have been making for a hundred years. The cardamom in our kardemummabullar likely grew within a few hundred kilometres of where we bake them.
The spice went on a 5,000-year journey around the world and ended up back where it started, wrapped in Swedish dough, on the outskirts of Bangalore. That's not just a baking recipe. That's a love letter from one culture to another, written in butter and cardamom.
Taste the connection in a FIKA FIVE (Rs 950) — featuring our kardemummabullar (cardamom buns), kanelbullar (cinnamon buns), and more. Or order a FIKA TEN (Rs 1,900) for the full range.