Cumin

Cumin: what lore surrounds it?

“According to Theophrastus, the ancients were accustomed to sow the seed of Cumin (Cuminum Cyminum), with an accompaniment of oaths and maledictions,” Folkard writes, a custom he takes for an incantation against the Evil Eye. “Among the Greeks, Cumin symbolised meanness and cupidity: the people nicknamed Marcus Antoninus, Cumin, on account of his avarice.” The plant “appears to have been regarded as specially possessing the power of retention”: in Germany loaves had cumin put in them against wood-demons, in Italy it is given to pigeons “to make them tame and fond of their home,” and “country lasses also endeavour to make their lovers swallow it, in order to ensure their continued attachment and fidelity.”

Thiselton-Dyer gives the precept of the German wood-folk, “Peel no tree, Relate no dream, Pipe no bread, or Bake no cumin in bread, So will God help thee in thy need,” and the forest-wife who tasted a new loaf and screamed, “They've baken for me cumin bread, That on this house brings great distress,” after which the peasant's prosperity waned. Cumin and cyclamen “from the time of Theophrastus have been coveted for their magic virtues,” and “in Italy cumin is given to pigeons for the purpose of taming them.”

Grieve adds that the smoked seeds “were found to occasion pallor of the face, whence the expression of Horace, exsangue cuminum, and Pliny tells us that the followers of the celebrated rhetorician Porcius Latro employed it to produce a complexion such as bespeaks application to study.” In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries its price in England “was 2d., equivalent to 1s. 4d. at the present day,” and in Malta it is “cumino aigro (hot Cumin), to distinguish it from Anise, which they term cumino dulce.”