Cannabis cuisine
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Cannabis cuisine is the food and drink made with cannabis. Two parts of the plant go into it. The seed, roasted, pounded or pressed for oil, is eaten in grain dishes, soups and seasonings from the Himalayas to eastern Europe, China and Japan. The leaf, flower and resin of the drug plant go into drinks, sweets, soups and curries. In India the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission described in 1894 the drinks of bhang and the sweetmeats of bhang and ganja eaten across the country.[1]: 156–158 Cooking with cannabis is also recorded in Egypt, Morocco and Paris, in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Aceh in Indonesia, and in Jamaica.
Seed foods
The Himalayas
Bhangolu, recorded in Kulu in 1880, was the seed of cultivated hemp, parched, mixed with parched grain, generally wheat, and eaten dry.[2]: 379 In the Manikaran valley of Kullu the roasted seed of wild hemp, mangolu, flavours the steamed bread siddu and the winter dish aaksalu, and is made into a condiment.[3]: 127–128 The botanist G. K. Sharma recorded bhang paranthas, wheat breads stuffed with roasted cannabis seed, in the Indian Himalayas in 1977.[4]: 206–207 The district administration of Almora, in Kumaon, describes a chutney of hemp seed with cumin seed, garlic leaves, tamarind and salt, bhang ki chutney.[5]
Eastern Europe
In Poland siemieniotka, a soup of hemp seed boiled, pounded and rinsed into a milky broth, is eaten at the Christmas Eve supper in Silesia and neighbouring regions.[6][7] Mykola Markevych's book of Ukrainian customs and cookery, published in 1860, gives khomy, cakes of mashed peas and pounded hemp seed, and pleskana, buckwheat lemishka rolled with pounded seed and browned in the oven.[8]: 159, 164 In Russia, Vladimir Dal's dictionary calls hemp oil postnoe maslo, the oil for fast days.[9]
East Asia
In Chinese medicine a thin rice congee cooked in the juice of crushed cannabis seed, maziren zhou, is eaten as a remedy. It is in Li Shizhen's Bencao gangmu of 1593, under the seed of cannabis.[10][11] In 2021 the Farmers' Daily reported that hemp-seed oil, hemp soup (huoma tang) and hemp congee were the commonest dishes on the tables of Bama Yao Autonomous County, in Guangxi.[12] In Japan the chilli seasoning shichimi togarashi usually has hemp seed among its seven ingredients.[13]
Leaf, flower and resin
South Asia
The commission of 1894 found the bhang drink called by many names. In the North-Western Provinces it was bhang, siddhi or thandai; in Sind it was ghota or panga, according to its strength.[1]: 156 In the anthropologist Khwaja Hasan's account from north India, thandai is made by grinding almonds, pistachios, rose petals, pepper and spices to a paste, dissolving it in milk and adding the bhang.[14]: 240 Mysore's bhangi-subjee was the drink made with water instead of milk, with basil seed added.[15]: 144 In the Sholapur district of the Bombay Presidency a gruel of sorghum with a little bhang and nux vomica was fermented into boja. In the Punjab bhang taken in country liquor was called lutki, and in Baluchistan a drink of bhang, datura, alcohol and opium was called mudra.[1]: 157
The commission called majum the commonest of the hemp sweetmeats, "known by that name from one end of India to the other", and listed yakuti, purnathi, gulkhand and halwa among the sweets like it. The simplest way of eating the drugs, it wrote, was fakki, ganja or bhang pounded with spices and swallowed as a bolus.[1]: 158 In the Madras Presidency ganja fried in ghee, strained and sweetened was pillai legiyam; washed, powdered and mixed with ghee, sugar and spices, it was purnadhi legiyam.[16]: 190 Mysore had a sweetened ganja powder, churum, which I. C. and R. N. Chopra wrote in 1957 was "now rarely met with".[15]: 145[17] Sharma recorded fritters of cannabis leaves, bhang pakoras, in the Himalayas,[4]: 206–207 and Hasan the ice cream with bhang that north Indians called hari gulfi, "green ice cream".[14]: 240
Egypt, Morocco and Paris
In Cairo in the 1830s, Edward William Lane wrote, the Egyptians made several conserves of hemp, hellebore and opium with aromatic drugs; a conserve of this kind was called maagoon.[18] In December 1924 Egypt's first delegate to the Second Opium Conference at Geneva, Mohamed El Guindy, named maagun, manzul and the hard sweet garawish among the sweets made in Egypt from a paste of cannabis resin, sugar and butter.[19]: 133 In Morocco, the ethnopharmacologist Jamal Bellakhdar writes, ma'jûn is made from the best resin and eaten in cakes, in sweets, in spiced dishes and in tea or coffee.[20]: 112
A circle of writers in Paris, Théophile Gautier among them, took hashish in the 1840s as dawamesk, a paste of cannabis cooked in fat with honey and pistachios.[21]: 58–59 The Haschich fudge printed in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book in 1954 was not Toklas's own recipe: the painter Brion Gysin, who lived in Morocco, sent it to her.[22][23]
Southeast Asia
In Cambodia, as the ethnobotanist Marie Alexandrine Martin recorded it in 1975, roasted cannabis leaves flavoured soups such as sngao moan and samla kako, and fresh leaves were a seasoning for curry and a vegetable served with vermicelli soup. In Thailand she found ground cannabis flowers added to the curry kaeng phet.[24]: 73 In Laos ten stems of cannabis without flowers were sold "for making soup".[24]: 66
In Aceh, cooks, sellers and commentators interviewed by journalists from 2007 onwards and in a 2024 study describe ground cannabis seed used as a seasoning, chiefly to make meat tender in curries and broths.[25][26]: 90–91, 93 A seller of the goat curry gulai kameng in Banda Aceh described adding the seed in 2007,[27] and in 2020 a commentator from Aceh named kuah beulangong, kari sie itek and ie bu peudah.[28] Informants told Merdeka.com in 2017 that cannabis seed mixed with ground coffee was an older Acehnese use.[25] Cannabis coffee, kopi ganja, was being made and sold in 2020.[29]
The Caribbean
In rural Jamaica in the early 1970s ganja went into food only now and then. One man made pepperpot soup with susumba, calalu and green ganja, two others added ganja to soup when they cooked for themselves in the fields, a Rastafarian chewed green ganja stalks and leaves, and one young woman made a ganja wine by boiling the plant and leaving it to ferment. Some people said they had heard that ganja could be cooked with greens or with chocho and bananas.[30]: 50–51 Lambros Comitas called this way of taking ganja occasional and limited, beside the common ganja tea and tonics.[31]: 124–125
Names that mislead
Sambal ganja, an Acehnese relish of roasted shrimp with chilli, shallot, garlic and bilimbi, contains no cannabis according to Liputan6 and ANTARA, which report that the name refers to how hard it is to stop eating it.[32][33] In southern Africa the anthropologist Brian du Toit argued that the early Cape accounts of a dagga that was eaten or drunk describe other plants, among them Leonotis leonurus, whose local names also contain the word.[34]: 89, 91–92
Modern dishes
In the 1990s restaurants in Phnom Penh served pizza with cannabis to foreign visitors. In 1998 Amit Gilboa of Cannabis Culture described a pizza restaurant where a customer could ask for a pizza "mildly happy" or "extra happy".[35] In Aceh a maker of dodol ganja, the Acehnese sweet of glutinous rice with cannabis seed and leaf added, told Merdeka.com in 2017 that it began as an invention of smokers who wanted a way of taking cannabis that would not draw the attention of the police.[36]
Preparations
Dishes
| Dish | Country | Part of the plant | First recorded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aaksalu | India | Seed | |
| Bhang pakora | India | Leaf | |
| Bhang parantha | India | Seed | |
| Bhangolu | India | Seed | |
| Fakki | India | Leaf Flower | |
| Gulai kameng | Indonesia | Seed | |
| Huoma tang | China | Seed | |
| Ie bu peudah | Indonesia | Seed | |
| Kaeng phet | Thailand | Flower | |
| Kari sie itek | Indonesia | Seed | |
| Khomy | Ukraine | Seed | |
| Kuah beulangong | Indonesia | Seed | |
| Maziren zhou | China | Seed | |
| Mie Aceh | Indonesia | Seed | |
| Pepperpot soup | Jamaica | Whole plant | |
| Pleskana | Ukraine | Seed | |
| Samla kako | Cambodia | Leaf | |
| Siddu | India | Seed | |
| Siemieniotka | Poland | Seed | |
| Sngao moan | Cambodia | Leaf |
Drinks
| Drink | Country | Part of the plant | First recorded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bhangi-subjee | India | Flower | |
| Boja | India | Leaf | |
| Ganja tea | Jamaica | Leaf | |
| Ghota | India | Leaf Seed | |
| Kopi ganja | Indonesia | Seed Whole plant | |
| Licor Montecristo de Haschisch | Spain | Whole plant | |
| Lutki | India Pakistan | Leaf | |
| Mudra | India Pakistan | Leaf | |
| Thandai | India | Leaf Flower |
Sweets
| Sweet | Country | Part of the plant | First recorded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Churum | India | Flower | |
| Dawamesk | France | Flower Resin | |
| Garawish | Egypt | Resin | |
| Gulkand | India | Leaf Flower | |
| Halwa | India | Leaf Flower | |
| Hari gulfi | India | Leaf | |
| Haschich fudge | Morocco | Whole plant | |
| Majoun | India Indonesia Egypt Morocco | Leaf Flower Resin | |
| Manzul | Egypt | Resin | |
| Pillai legiyam | India | Flower | |
| Purnadhi | India | Flower | |
| Purnadhi legiyam | India | Flower | |
| Yakuti | India | Leaf Flower |
Condiments
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. VIII, "Extent of use and the manner and forms in which the hemp drugs are consumed", paras. 415–429, pp. 154–158 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94, Vol. V: Evidence of witnesses from North-Western Provinces and Oudh and Punjab. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Punjab witness no. 10, Mr. Alexander Anderson, pp. 377–380 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Rathore, S.; Shashni, S.; Samant, S.S.; Sundriyal, R.C. (2018). "Indigenous uses of wild hemp (Cannabis sativa) by the local inhabitants in Manikaran Valley of Himachal Pradesh, North Western Himalaya". Journal of Non-Timber Forest Products. 25 (3): 127–130. doi:10.54207/bsmps2000-2018-7393KF.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Sharma, G. K. (1977). "Cannabis folklore in the Himalayas". Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University. 25 (7): 203–215. doi:10.5962/p.295211.
- ↑ "Cuisines". District Almora, Government of Uttarakhand. 19 April 2018. Retrieved 28 October 2026.
- ↑ "Siemieniotka". Lista produktów tradycyjnych (in polski). Ministerstwo Rolnictwa i Rozwoju Wsi. 3 June 2018. Retrieved 29 October 2026.
- ↑ "Siemieniatka / siemieniotka / konopiotka". Lista produktów tradycyjnych (in polski). Ministerstwo Rolnictwa i Rozwoju Wsi. 3 June 2018. Retrieved 29 October 2026.
- ↑ Markevych, Mykola (1860). Obychai, poveria, kukhnia i napitki malorossiian Обычаи, повѣрья, кухня и напитки малороссіянъ [Customs, beliefs, cookery and drinks of the Little Russians] (PDF) (in русский). Kiev: I. Davidenko.
- ↑ Dal, Vladimir. "Постить". Tolkovyi slovar' zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka Толковый словарь живого великорусского языка [Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language] (in русский). Retrieved 29 October 2026 – via slovardalja.net.
- ↑ 李時珍 (Li Shizhen). "卷二十二：穀之一（胡麻；大麻）". 本草綱目 [Compendium of Materia Medica] (in 中文) (Siku quanshu ed.). Retrieved 3 October 2026 – via Wikisource.
- ↑ Brand, E. Joseph; Zhao, Zhongzhen (2017). "Cannabis in Chinese medicine: are some traditional indications referenced in ancient literature related to cannabinoids?". Frontiers in Pharmacology. 8 108. doi:10.3389/fphar.2017.00108.
- ↑ Zhou, Hanwei (1 November 2021). ""长寿之乡"广西巴马 康养旅游开启乡村振兴新动能" [Guangxi's Bama, "home of longevity": health tourism opens new momentum for rural revitalisation]. Farmers' Daily (in 中文). Retrieved 29 October 2026 – via 人民政协网 (rmzxw.com.cn).
- ↑ "七味唐辛子の七つ全部言える？ : 江戸前期から伝わる日本独自のミックススパイス" [Can you name all seven in shichimi tōgarashi? A Japanese spice blend handed down from the early Edo period]. nippon.com (in 日本語). 17 July 2024. Retrieved 29 October 2026.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 Hasan, Khwaja A. (1975). "Social aspects of the use of cannabis in India". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 235–246. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.235.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Memorandum regarding ganja and its preparations in Mysore, by Mr. J. G. McDonnell, Special Assistant Excise Commissioner in Mysore". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. III: Appendices, Miscellaneous. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. pp. 144–145 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Mr. L. C. Miller, Acting Collector of Trichinopoly". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. VI: Evidence of Witnesses from Central Provinces and Madras. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Madras witness no. 18, pp. 190–192 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Chopra, I. C.; Chopra, R. N. (1957). "The use of the cannabis drugs in India". Bulletin on Narcotics (1). United Nations: 4–29.
- ↑ Lane, Edward William (1890) [1836]. "Use of tobacco, coffee, hemp, opium, etc.". An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Written in Egypt during the Years 1833–1835. London: Ward, Lock and Co. ch. XV – via Project Gutenberg.
- ↑ League of Nations (August 1925). Records of the Second Opium Conference, Geneva, November 17th, 1924 – February 19th, 1925. Volume I: Plenary Meetings, Text of the Debates. Geneva: League of Nations. C.760.M.260.1924.XI – via Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics.
- ↑ Bellakhdar, Jamal (2013). "L'histoire du chanvre au Maghreb". Hespéris-Tamuda. XLVIII: 107–141. ISSN 0018-1005.
- ↑ Gautier, T. (1868). "Charles Baudelaire". Les Fleurs du mal. Œuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire (in français). Vol. I. Paris: Michel Lévy frères. pp. 1–75 – via Wikisource.
- ↑ Temple, Emily (20 November 2018). "Here It Is! Alice B. Toklas's Recipe for Hash Brownies". Literary Hub. Retrieved 29 October 2026.
- ↑ Eplett, Layla (20 April 2015). "Go Ask Alice: The History of Toklas' Legendary Hashish Fudge". Scientific American. Retrieved 29 October 2026.
- ↑ 24.0 24.1 Martin, Marie Alexandrine (1975). "Ethnobotanical Aspects of Cannabis in Southeast Asia". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 63–76. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.63.
- ↑ 25.0 25.1 Fadil, Iqbal (13 April 2017). "Jejak ganja di kuliner Aceh" [Traces of cannabis in Acehnese cuisine]. Merdeka.com (in Bahasa Indonesia). Retrieved 28 October 2026.
- ↑ Musanna, Khadijatul; Nabilah, Deva; Suip, Muhammad Nuur Iman bin (2024). "Cannabis Seeds as a Culinary Ingredient: A Sociological Study of the Acehnese Community". Shahih: Journal of Islamicate Multidisciplinary. 9 (2): 83–98. doi:10.22515/shahih.v2i9.10195.
- ↑ "Biji Ganja di Gulai Kameng" [Cannabis seed in goat curry]. detikNews (in Bahasa Indonesia). 2 July 2007. Retrieved 28 October 2026.
- ↑ "Jejak Ganja dalam Kuliner Aceh" [Traces of cannabis in Acehnese cuisine]. CNN Indonesia (in Bahasa Indonesia). 2 February 2020.
- ↑ Illahi, Kurnia (22 December 2020). "Polisi Gagalkan Peredaran Dodol dan Susu Ganja Asal Aceh" [Police stop the trade in cannabis dodol and cannabis milk from Aceh]. iNews.id (in Bahasa Indonesia). Retrieved 28 October 2026.
- ↑ Rubin, Vera; Comitas, Lambros (1975). Ganja in Jamaica: A Medical Anthropological Study of Chronic Marihuana Use. The Hague: Mouton. doi:10.1515/9783110812077.
- ↑ Comitas, Lambros (1975). "The social nexus of ganja in Jamaica". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 119–132. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.119.
- ↑ Tifani (30 July 2023). "5 Sajian Sambal Khas Sumatra yang Menggoyang Lidah, Ada Sambal Ganja" [Five Sumatran sambals, among them sambal ganja]. Liputan6.com (in Bahasa Indonesia). Retrieved 28 October 2026.
- ↑ "Cocol ayam tangkap dan sambal ganja khas Tanah Rencong yang bikin nagih" [Ayam tangkap and Aceh's sambal ganja]. ANTARA News Jawa Timur (in Bahasa Indonesia). 24 August 2022. Retrieved 28 October 2026.
- ↑ du Toit, Brian M. (1975). "Dagga: The History and Ethnographic Setting of Cannabis sativa in Southern Africa". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 81–116. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.81.
- ↑ Gilboa, Amit (1 November 1998). "Cannabis Cambodia: Smoker's Paradise". Cannabis Culture.
- ↑ Afif (18 April 2017). "Dodol ganja khas Aceh yang bikin halusinasi" [The cannabis dodol of Aceh that causes hallucinations]. Merdeka.com (in Bahasa Indonesia). Retrieved 28 October 2026.