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I can't remember for what we bought them; it was probably for something baked and sweet and spicy. I don't remember their being bought. I only remember my mom pulling them out of the spice cabinet, a glass McCormick's spice jar filled with puffy white bean-shaped pods. "Look," she said, with obvious relish. "We have cardamom seeds." Although the dollar amount escapes me now, I do recall seeing a price tag, and being shocked that such an amount of money went into such a little jar. "Oh, but these last forever. You only need very, very tiny amounts."

I was ten. My mom was seven months pregnant. Several weeks before, I had been in a bad car accident, an accident that by all laws of physics should have sent me hurtling through the windshield, but for reasons I don't understand, I merely hit the dashboard hard enough to be knocked unconscious. I had also received a cut on my knee, probably from the door handle, that took eight stitches to close. I was not much interested in going out to play that winter. I watched snowstorms and ice storms from the kitchen window while my mom and I turned out brownies and challah and chocolate chip cookies, which we ate with our tea, our feet up on the coffee table. I drank cup after cup of cambric tea (weak tea, heavy on the milk and sugar), and listened as my mom explained how long it would take us to get through the cardamom.

"By the time we use this much [about four pods, a mere drop in the bucket as far as this jar was concerned], the baby will be walking. This much more, the baby will be in kindergarten. Maybe we'll finish the jar before the baby gets to high school!" Maybe she was pulling my leg, or maybe she was nervous about using too much of such a strong and expensive spice, but either way, the end result was the same: goggle-eyed amazement in me. Look at how much cardamom we had! Such a big thing in such a small package! Imagine, one day the baby would be big enough to go to high school!

I have no memory of our using any of those cardamom pods. I know I was intimidated by them, the expensive little buggers. A little over a year later, we moved out of that house to a house closer to town, and I'm sure the cardamom did not move with us. Since that day, though, a lot has changed. The baby, whose teenage years once seemed as remote as the Northern Lights, will be 27 in May. I never buy the oversized white cardamom pods supposedly favored by Scandinavian bakers, opting instead for the smaller, harder green pods that are sold at the Indian grocery on Ditmars Boulevard. Apparently I have got over my Fear of Cardamom, because I use it as often as I can possibly get away with using any single ingredient.

There are a few truisms I find repeatedly when I read about cardamom, and while I can't verify them without doing some research, I'll repeat them here anyway, with a healthy dose of caveat emptor: One is that the most common uses of cardamom are in two wildly divergent cuisines: Indian cooks use them whole, in savory dishes, while Scandinavian cooks grind them for use in cakes, cookies and sweet breads. It's a sensible observation, except when it is accompanied by much headscratching, as if it were an improbable trick for a spice to be so cherished in both cold green countries and hot lush countries. (If you pick up a good history of the spice trade, such as Spice: The History of a Temptation by Jack Turner or Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices by Andrew Dalby, the trick will not seem nearly as improbable, or tricky.) I've also read that cardamom is the third most expensive spice in the world, after saffron and vanilla. Again, I won't state this as fact without a look at commodity prices, but based on the money I have spent on saffron and vanilla, as well as cardamom, over the years, I find it a sensible observation.

Although cardamom has a definite taste, peppery without being hot, it is the aroma that will hit you first when you cut open a cardamom pod. It is pungent, vaguely camphorated, but in a sweet way. The Oxford Companion to Food traces the source of this sweet pungency to cineole, a component of the essential oil that can be distilled from a cardamom seed. It smells particularly gorgeous in a pilaf, particularly when your pilaf contains basmati rice, which smells so buttery and popcorn-like when you steam it. If you include a cinnamon stick, a bay leaf and half a dozen cardamom pods in your pot of rice, you will end up with a friendly, savory gift on a cold night, made friendlier by a little knob of butter. I could eat a bowl of this, and nothing else, for dinner, but if someone offered to top it with a nice helping of butter chicken, I would not say no. I would, however, eschew the pilau for plain rice if I were making rogan josh. For rogan josh, you brown cubes of stewing lamb, on bone or boneless (normally I would insist on on-bone, but in this dish, both work well). I usually buy three pounds of lamb, so that we can have a couple of day's worth of leftovers. When the lamb has browned, I take it out of the pan and saute two sliced medium yellow onions and about an inch of grated fresh ginger. I return the lamb to the pan and stir in about a cup of yogurt and about two cups of water brought to the boil and then taken off the heat, along with salt, pepper, cayenne, coriander and cardamom to taste. You can also use the rogan josh spice mix from Penzeys, which is very good. You can also add oil or ghee to the onions if it looks like they are sticking to the pan. I really, really love this stew, and I have fed it to people who swear that they can't bear the taste of lamb. I don't know what it is about this particular spice blend that cuts the gaminess of the lamb; I only know it works.

But it is as a spice for sweeties that cardamom really works its magic on me. I have a mason jar full of sugar cubes in my pantry with 1/2 cup of cracked cardamom pods layered in. I originally put it together as a topping for a rhubarb and orange tart I found in Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock's The Gift of Southern Cooking, but now I use them everywhere: crushed as a topping for coffee breads and muffins, in my coffee, in my tea. If you rub one on the skin of a navel orange, you get a cardamom-and-orange-infused sugar cube, which is really great in black tea. I have made cardamom ice cream and cardamom panna cotta, which is fresh-tasting and delicious when firm, but is even better when it has just set, softly, wobbling gently on the spoon, sliding dreamily over my tongue and down my throat, leaving me smiling. I have added cardamom to banana bread, which punches up the taste of the bananas in a very nice way. And now I have even more lovely sweets to try, thanks to our Kimberly, who tipped me off to Sugar High Fridays, and this week's adventures with nutmeg, allspice and cardamom, courtesy of Food and Thoughts. There is a cardamom and apricot muffin with my name on it, and I want it for breakfast.

In the end, though, there are two things that I love best of all, two things that will keep me in cardamom love forever. One is the frequently-name-dropped cardamom snaps recipe, created by Craig Claiborne, championed by Maida Heatter, and transcribed by the aforementioned lovely Kimberly. I will admit that while the recipe is nice enough as is, I've decided that these cookies demand no half-measures, and I use a full tablespoon of ground cardamom, rather than the 1/2 teaspoon the recipe calls for. The other is what would have become my signature cake had I ever opened that bakery I keep threatening to open. It is a basic butter cake, flavored with citrus peel and buttermilk, baked to a deep amber in a bundt pan and then saturated with a syrup made of citrus juice and sugar. Maida Heatter uses lemon rind and juice to flavor her buttermilk cake, while Gale Gand uses tangerines. As for me, I grate a little lemon zest into the batter, but I also throw in a tablespoon of freshly-ground cardamom (I pull the seeds from about 1/4 cup whole cardamom pods and then grind them in a spice grinder to get a tablespoon of ground cardamom; it is time-consuming and tedious, but if you have something interesting to watch on tv or someone compelling to talk to on the phone, the time goes much faster), and I use lime juice in the soaking syrup. The resulting cake is warm and wonderful, good for picnics in the summer, but even better for sleety winter weather-watching, ready to accompany your cup of tea.