This Three-Ingredient Butter Is What Your Corn Muffins Are Missing

Since I was after a pretty straightforward—or maybe better said, cornforward—recipe for the muffins, I didn’t want to add cardamom, which has such a distinct flavor, to the batter. But I loved the combination of perfumy, sweet, slightly spicy cardamom with sweet corn, so I decided to develop a recipe for a cardamom compound butter to go with the corn muffins. 

Cardamom, a spice from the ginger family, is sold in pods, as shelled seeds, or ground. The flavor is hard to explain but easy to recognize. It has a citrusy, sweet, herbal warmth. It’s often used in curries, rice pudding, and chai. The spice blend garam masala typically has a good dose of cardamom.  

It’s not a cheap spice. In fact, cardamom is the third most expensive spice in the world (behind saffron and vanilla) because it is hard to harvest. But thankfully a little goes a long way. 

In the case of this butter, a bit of ground cardamom mashed with a stick of butter, salt, and brown sugar creates a delicious compound butter that is far greater than the sum of its parts. You get a salty, sweet, complex mixture that’s great slathered on those aforementioned corn muffins but also worth keeping in the fridge to spread on toast or biscuits, smear over a piece of roasted salmon or chicken, or toss onto freshly popped popcorn.