Egyptian Fennel (Shamar) - Whole Seed for Infusion

Fennel and anise taste like relatives because they are built around the same compound. Both are led by anethole, which is why a cup of either reads as sweet and liquorice-like, and why people who like one usually like the other. They are still different plants and they are not interchangeable. If you already have the anise on this site, this is the milder, greener, more vegetal one; if you find anise too sweet or too intense, this is the seed to reach for instead.

The difference has a cause. Alongside anethole, fennel carries fenchone, a camphor-like compound that anise does not have in any quantity, and fenchone is exactly the slightly bitter, faintly medicinal edge that keeps fennel from tasting like a sweet. Anise is anethole almost alone, which is why it is sweeter, rounder and more concentrated. In practice: anise for baking and for a comforting bedtime cup, fennel for after a heavy meal and for anything savoury.

They also look different once you know. Fennel seed, Foeniculum vulgare, is larger than anise, olive to yellow-green rather than grey-brown, longer and more clearly ribbed, with a slight curve. Anise is small, rounder and dull grey-brown. Neither should be confused with star anise, which is a woody star from an unrelated tree in China and Vietnam and simply looks nothing like a seed.

Worth saying plainly: the fennel sold in a supermarket vegetable aisle is the same species and a different part of it. That white bulb is the swollen leaf base of a cultivated variety, eaten as a vegetable, and it will not substitute for the seed any more than the seed will substitute for it. What is in this pouch is the dried fruit of the plant, which is where the aroma concentrates.

In Egypt it is shamar, and it is a household drink rather than a tourist one - brewed after food, often at the end of a long evening, and given to guests as an alternative to yet another glass of tea. It sits in the same part of the cupboard as yansoon and karawya, and Egyptian kitchens tend to keep all three rather than choosing between them.

To brew: crack a teaspoon of seed lightly, water just off the boil, five to seven minutes, covered. Cracking matters less here than with anise because fennel's fruit wall is thinner and gives up its oil more readily, but it still helps. Covered matters more, since the aroma is volatile and leaves with the steam. Fennel is forgiving of a long steep and will not turn harsh the way a black tea does.

In the kitchen it is a savoury seed above all. It is the fennel in Italian sausage, in finocchiona and in porchetta; it goes with pork, oily fish, tomato sauces and white beans. It is one of the five seeds in Bengali panch phoron, it appears in Chinese five-spice, and across India a bowl of sugar-coated fennel sits by the door of a restaurant to be chewed on the way out - mukhwas, a habit rather than a course.

Fennel seed is dense and packs small, so the full ladder up to 1 kg is offered here as it is on anise and caraway, and not on the leaf teas, where a kilogram would be an impossible pouch. Shamar has a long history of traditional use in Egypt as an everyday infusion taken after food. That is offered as a description of the custom, not as a health claim or medical advice.