fenugreek seeds

The seed of Trigonella foenum-graecum, a hard amber legume seed, and in this library it has one job: 4 grams, about a teaspoon of whole seeds, in the Japanese Curry Powder. It is toasted dry with the coriander, cumin, fennel and the rest for 4 minutes. The recipe says toasting is what frees sotolon, the single molecule most responsible for the smell people call curry, and that one teaspoon of seed reads across a whole jar.

The Journal's note on how a pinch of fenugreek disappears into tomatoes and a spoonful takes them over explains why a trace is enough. Sotolon has been described as honeyed, nutty, curry and burnt depending on its concentration; at the low end it reads as seasoning rather than fenugreek, and it was isolated from a lovage extract that tastes seasoning-like and turns up among the high-impact odorants of soy sauce. The Journal's note on Japanese curry adds that fenugreek is a minor ingredient by weight in the seventeen-ingredient S&B tin, yet the compound registers in air at 0.02 nanograms per litre. The bitterness is a separate matter: it comes from steroidal saponins, which are water-soluble, so traditional preparations soak or boil the seed and pour the water away.

The smell does not stay in the pot. A 1981 letter in the New England Journal of Medicine described maple-syrup urine odor after fenugreek, and in 2001 newborns whose mothers had eaten it were briefly suspected of a metabolic disorder. On milk supply, the note calls the evidence thin: one meta-analysis found a mild effect, another found no good evidence of any effect.