Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Cook's Guide entry for Poppy Seeds along with all the recipes employing Poppy Seeds presented on this site, with 72 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the Poppy Seeds recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain Poppy Seeds as a major wild food ingredient.

Poppy Seeds are the seeds of the annual plant Papaver somniferum (the opium poppy). This is a very ancient spice, known to have been cultivated for at last 5000 years and there is some indication that the culinary use of poppy seeds extends much further back in time (the seeds have been found in many ancient burials).



The seeds of the poppy are widely used as the popular "poppy-seed" found in and on many food items such as bagels, muffins and cakes. The seeds can be pressed to form poppy seed oil, which can be used in cooking. The name Papaver is Latin for poppy and somniferum means 'sleep-inducing' in Latin. This is probably due to the opiates in the seed-pod of the poppy. The seeds only contain trace amounts of this though the sensitivity of modern drug tests may mean that consuming a large number of poppy-based products (about five poppy-seed bagels) could lead to the failing of a drug test.



One very ancient recipe from Europe is a cake based on ground poppy seeds.