Imagine cooking and eating without fresh herbs. It would be perfectly possible, but oh, it would be dull. Think of eating a piece of warm focaccia that lacked the uplift of rosemary. Or consider Mexican food without the grassy hit of cilantro, or a bowl of Vietnamese pho soup deprived of its essential mint. Cooking without herbs might still be nourishing, but half the pleasure would be gone.
The rise of fresh herbs is one of the happiest stories of modern eating. Every time you use them in your cooking, you are recognizing that food is something more than mere fuel. When you take the trouble to add tarragon to a roast chicken, put mint leaves in a pitcher of water, or adorn a platter of roast beetroot with feathery leaves of dill, you are saying that flavor matters. The person who cooks with herbs is making a stand for joy.
Most Americans are using far greater quantities of herbs—and different ones—than in the past. Sales of fresh herbs in the U.S. have tripled since 2000 from 1% of all fresh produce sales to 3%. Fresh herbs used to seem like a fancy luxury ingredient compared with an old-fashioned jar of dried oregano, but a survey in 2018 by Shenandoah Growers, a Virginia-based produce firm, suggested that more than half of all shoppers now regularly buy fresh herbs.
This growth is being driven partly by the rise in popularity of Asian cuisines. Along with the older Western stalwarts of parsley and chives, Americans are increasingly buying Thai basil and makrut lime leaves and fresh methi leaves (a grassy and pungent herb much used in Indian cooking). These trends can also be seen in Europe. Germany was traditionally a land of dill and parsley, but cooks there have now embraced cilantro and lemongrass.
“ I sometimes stop and think how different our kitchens must smell from those of a few decades ago, in large part because of our changing use of herbs. ”
What, actually, is an herb? Sometimes the term is used interchangeably with “spice,” but technically, an herb—which comes from the Latin herba, meaning grass—comes from the green leaf of a plant, whereas spices come from other parts such as seeds, bark, roots and buds.
I sometimes stop and think how different our kitchens must smell from those of a few decades ago, in large part because of our changing use of herbs. In “Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book,” published in 1950, the anonymous author confidently pronounces that there are just “six simple herbs basic to all seasoning”: mint, thyme, sage, marjoram, rosemary and basil. Except for mint and basil, all of these are described as being good for stuffings and meat cookery, which reflects what a limited number of dishes herbs tended to be used in back then.
The author also grudgingly admits that bay leaves, chives, chervil, parsley and tarragon are useful “additional herbs.” But there is no mention at all of cilantro, which has grown in popularity along with Mexican immigration to the U.S. since then. The wide range of herbs in U.S. markets today is one of the ways that American society has been enriched by waves of immigrants.
The first herb to transform modern Western cooking was arguably Italian basil, which started showing up in U.S. food markets in the 1970s. With its soft, heavily perfumed leaves, basil was a gateway to other herbs. The scent of basil is the promise of “warmth and sunlight,” in the words of Jill Norman, author of “Herbs and Spices: The Cook’s Reference.” Once you get hooked on basil, you can never go back to cooking without herbs. Basil still accounts for around 40% of all fresh herb sales in the U.S., partly because it can be used in so many different ways, whether torn on a tomato salad or shredded on a stir-fry.
In the beginning, the popularity of basil was all about pesto, the Ligurian sauce pounded from basil, garlic, olive oil, pine nuts and grated Pecorino or Parmesan cheese. As Italian food writer Anna del Conte has observed, there is an irony in the global popularity of pesto, given that in Italy, its flavor is said to depend on the specific sweetness of basil grown in the hot Ligurian sun. “It is indeed odd that the only speciality from Liguria that genuinely needs a local ingredient should be the one that has traveled all over the world,” she says.
Pesto broke the idea that herbs were just about garnish—the measly sprig of curly leaf parsley that used to be added on top of most of the British restaurant food I remember from the 1980s, only to be discarded by the eater. Pesto showed that herbs can be fully integral to a dish. The 1990s were the decade of green herb sauces of one kind or another. As well as pesto, there was salsa verde (Italian green sauce made from a lot of parsley mixed with capers, anchovies and oil) and chimichurri (green sauce from Argentina that is spicy with oregano, parsley, garlic, chili and vinegar).
Now, under the influence of Middle Eastern cuisine, we are getting bolder still in our use of herbs and seeing that they can be used by the handful rather than the tablespoon. The Persian omelet, kuku sabzi, is so green that there are more herbs in it by volume than eggs. Once you add dishes like this to your repertoire, you start to rebel against the small plastic clamshells of fresh herbs in the big supermarket chains and you seek out the big bunches of herbs in Turkish or Chinese food stores.
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One of my favorite new cookbooks of the summer is “Herb: A Cook’s Companion” by Mark Diacono. Mr. Diacono is a British vegetable gardener as well as a cook. He uses herbs to flavor vinegars and salts, he coats whole herb leaves in batter and deep fries them (so good), he chops them and stuffs them in a Greek herb pie with spinach and ricotta, and he scatters them liberally in salads. He has a recipe for grilled peaches with basil, watercress and shaved Parmesan which is exactly what I want to eat on a summer’s evening. Mr. Diacono reminded me that with herbs, there is always something new to discover. (Next on my list is Korean mint.)
To cook with all these herbs feels very modern and fresh, but in a way, it is just a revival of older ways of cooking. In Renaissance Europe, herbs were seen as vital in the kitchen, both for seasoning and as medicine. I recently came across a recipe from a 1591 cookbook called “The Treasurie of Commodious Conceits.” The recipe claimed it would “comfort the heart and take away melancholy.” It mainly consists of the juice of borage, an herb with leaves that taste like cucumber. One day, feeling blue, I ate a few borage flowers from my garden to test the theory. It didn’t work, sad to say. But it’s definitely true that life is sweeter with herbs.
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The Link LonkJune 18, 2021 at 05:13AM
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The Herb Revolution in American Cooking - The Wall Street Journal
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