Caraway, Carum carvi, is a biennial of the carrot family grown for its warm, sharp seeds, long used in bread, cheese and cordials across Europe and the Near East. It is one of the oldest of cultivated spices, its seeds found in ancient settlements. Its most distinctive folklore is a single persistent theme: caraway was held to confer retention, preventing the theft or loss of any object that contained it, and stopping any person or creature that ate it from wandering away.
Caraway seed cake was, in rural England, the traditional reward baked for farmworkers once the spring sowing was finished, a harvest custom old enough that Shakespeare has Justice Shallow offer Falstaff a pippin and a dish of caraways in Henry IV, Part 2, and the plain seed cake remained a fixture of English baking into the twentieth century. The same seeds flavour rye bread across Germany, Austria and Scandinavia and the spirits kummel and aquavit, so that a plant valued in magic chiefly for making things stay put has, in the kitchen, travelled unusually widely. Its two-year growing cycle, seed sown in one year and the aromatic crop harvested only in the next, gave rural households a long, patient wait before the first cake or loaf could be made from a given sowing.