Nigella - Black Seed, Habbat el Baraka

Start with the names, because they cause more confusion than any other spice here. Nigella is sold as black seed, black caraway, black cumin, kalonji and habbat el baraka, and only the first is straightforwardly accurate. It is not caraway and not cumin, and is unrelated to either. It is Nigella sativa, of the buttercup family, and the seed comes from a papery pod left by a pale blue flower. If a recipe says black cumin and you are unsure which is meant, the shape settles it: nigella seeds are small, matt black and angular, like chips of coal, while cumin seeds of any colour are ridged ovals.

The flavour is genuinely its own. Raw, it is oniony and slightly bitter with a peppery bite at the back. Heat changes it completely - thirty seconds in a dry pan or a slick of oil and the bitterness recedes and a toasted, nutty, almost sesame-like quality comes forward. That is the version most people actually like, and it is why nigella is nearly always used on something baked or fried rather than stirred in raw at the end.

In Egypt its home is bread and cheese. It is scattered across baladi bread before baking, where the seeds toast in the oven heat, and it is stirred through the salty white cheeses eaten at breakfast. It appears in some pickles and in savoury pastries. Across the wider region it tops Turkish pide and simit, Lebanese manaqish, Indian naan and Bengali fish curries, and it is one of the five seeds in Bengali panch phoron.

Use it on anything that goes into an oven. Egg-wash a loaf, a flatbread or a batch of rolls and scatter the seeds on before baking. Put it on roast pumpkin, potatoes or cauliflower. Fry it in ghee or oil for a few seconds until it crackles and pour the lot over lentils, yoghurt or rice - the technique Indian cooking calls tempering, and it works with nigella as well as anything. Fold it through soft white cheese or labneh with a little olive oil.

It is one of the easier spices to be generous with. Unlike clove or loomi it does not take over a dish, and a heaped teaspoon on a loaf is normal rather than excessive. Avoid adding it raw at the very end, where the bitterness has nowhere to go.

The Egyptian name habbat el baraka translates as the seed of blessing, and it has one of the longest documented histories of anything in this catalogue - it was among the items recovered from the tomb of Tutankhamun. It holds real cultural importance across the Islamic world, where it is the subject of a well-known hadith, and has long been used in traditional medicine across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.

That reputation is why you will see nigella marketed with a long list of claimed effects, and this listing deliberately does not repeat any of them. It is sold here as what it is in an Egyptian kitchen: the black seed on the bread and in the cheese. Its traditional and religious standing is described above as history and custom, not as a statement of what it does, and nothing here is a health claim or medical advice.

Buy it whole and keep it whole. The seeds are hard, store well, and are almost always wanted intact - scattered on a surface or crackling in hot fat. There is little call for nigella powder, and grinding in advance throws away the texture that is half the reason to use it.