Cumin's name has passed from Sumerian clay tablets to modern kitchens
Say cumin and you are repeating a word roughly as old as writing. It runs back through Latin cuminum and Greek kuminon to Akkadian kamunu and finally Sumerian gamun. The seeds themselves turn up in a drowned village off the Levant coast dated to the early sixth millennium BC.
That submerged settlement, Atlit-Yam, yielded seeds of wild cumin. Later finds come from second-millennium BC Syria and from New Kingdom sites in Egypt, where the spice flavoured food and also helped preserve mummies. On Crete, Minoan scribes recorded cumin in Linear A tablets listing palace stores. Greek diners kept a pot of it on the table the way people now keep pepper, a habit Moroccans still follow, and Roman cooks used it heavily. Spanish and Portuguese colonists later carried it to the Americas.
The plant is a small annual in the parsley family, standing 30 to 50 cm tall and picked by hand. Its white or pink flowers sit in umbels, and each fruit is a ridged achene 4 to 5 mm long that resembles caraway. The two get muddled constantly: Indonesian calls both jinten, and several Slavic and Uralic languages label cumin "Roman caraway." The English pronunciation has shifted too; the old KUM-in rhyming with coming gave way in the late 20th century to KYOO-min and KOO-min in the United States.
India dominates the trade, producing about 70% of the world's supply and 856,000 tons of seed in the 2020 to 2021 fiscal year, with Syria at 13% and Turkey at 5%. The crop needs around 120 frost-free days and does best between 25 and 30 °C. Indian farmers sow from October into early December and start harvesting in February. Wet years invite fungus, and Fusarium wilt can wipe out as much as 80% of a harvest. Because cumin casts so little shade, with a leaf area index near 1.5, weeds crowd in easily, and fields need hoeing about 30 and 60 days after sowing.
Most of the warm, earthy smell comes from an oil compound called cuminaldehyde, and toasting adds pyrazines. Cooks put it into garam masala, chili powder, sofrito and bahaarat, and Dutch Leyden cheese is studded with it.
Source: Cumin
