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Herbs

Without herbs, you’ll be cooking with one hand tied behind your back. They offer an easy, quick and varied toolkit for adding flavour and interest to even the most basic dishes. No dish looks or tastes mundane when fresh herbs have been used. On the contrary, they are the cook’s instant ‘fixer’, a transformative ingredient whose green presence makes the humdrum look and taste special. There is scarcely a dish that is not improved with a final scattering of fresh herbs.

The flavours of individual herbs are unique, and even different varieties of the same herb can be markedly distinctive. The peppery basil you will see in markets in Italy, for instance, smells and tastes quite different from the more aniseed-flavoured sort that we commonly buy in our shops, or the small-leaved Greek bush basil. Flat parsley always tastes greener and more pungent than the curly type. Apple mint is quite unlike spearmint. On smell alone you can easily tell lemon thyme from the more common sort. And never make the mistake of buying a Russian tarragon plant instead of a French one, as the former tastes of zilch; the latter is the one you want.

If you can’t grow a few of your own herbs, then it is best to buy those cut herbs that come simply wrapped in a thin, slightly stiff plastic pouch. Some herbs are still sold in rigid plastic packs, which often look good superficially, but tend to hide herbs that are rotten in the middle because they have been squashed and have had no air circulating around them.

Herb plants sold for harvesting in the kitchen are fine if you only want a very small amount and no better loose-cut herbs are available, but they tend to produce rather spindly, leggy growth and have a pretty faint flavour and less aroma than you might expect from a herb plant bought in a garden centre and planted in soil. This is because they are really just clumps of overgrown, overcrowded seedlings – the sort that a gardener would normally thin out – that are competing with one another, rather than one healthy vigorous plant. These supermarket herb plants typically last for a shorter time than you might suppose.

Dried herbs are worth considering in place of fresh but are not usually a substitute for fresh herbs as the drying process intensifies their flavour and perfume and produces a stronger, more intense effect, so they are better thought of as seasonings, like salt or spices. Some herbs do dry better than others. Dried parsley or coriander, for instance, is a waste of space, but dried tarragon, oregano and mint, on the other hand, can be more effective and more delicious in some dishes than the jet-lagged, flaccid, fresh equivalent, particularly outside the summer months.

Things to do with herbs

• Chop finely or blend fistfuls of basil, flat parsley and mint with smaller amounts of garlic, anchovy, Dijon mustard, capers, olive oil and vinegar or lemon juice to make a vibrant salsa verde that can be served with asparagus or any roasted meat or fish.

• Make an omelette with thin discs of soft goat’s cheese and masses of chopped mint added at the last minute.

• Tomatoes taste great sprinkled with fresh breadcrumbs that have been mixed with fresh thyme, sea salt and black pepper, drizzled with oil, then roasted.

• Bay leaves have an affinity with lamb. Use them to perfume a lamb stock-based soup made with barley or spelt and chopped root vegetables.

• Roast chicken legs in olive oil with chopped rosemary and quartered lemons. Make a gravy by deglazing the rosemary-lemon roasting juices in the roasting tin with white wine, scraping the tin to get all the bits.

• Sage leaves are excellent when you sizzle them for seconds in hot oil until they become crisp. Handy for finishing off a herby risotto or for tarting up a soup.

• Sorrel sauce is brilliant with fish cakes or baked fish. Just sweat chopped shallot in butter, deglaze the pan with white wine or vermouth, add cream and bubble up. Add shredded ribbons of sorrel, cooking only for a minute or two until the sorrel wilts and turns olive green.

• Snippings of chive and chervil enliven simple scrambled eggs.

• Thyme is a non-negotiable ingredient in the marinade for Caribbean jerk chicken.

• Potato salad is vastly improved by heaps of chopped dill or fennel herb and chives.

• Fresh pesto, made by blending basil, pine kernels, grated Parmesan and olive oil, puts the bought stuff in the shade.

• Pour boiling water on fresh mint, fennel herb, lemon balm, bay leaves or verbena to make a fragrant tisane.

Are herbs good for me?

Each herb has its own precise chemical make-up but, collectively, herbs are mini treasure troves of the beneficial compounds that we associate with green plant foods, which is why they have been used medicinally for centuries. Fennel and mint have been used to soothe indigestion and colic, for instance, while thyme is used in many traditional medicine systems for coughs and as an antiseptic. Even if you only eat herbs in small quantities, they give you the opportunity to pick up small, but nevertheless useful amounts of natural plant compounds that are often lacking in diets top-heavy with processed food. Rather than thinking of herbs as just a flavouring or garnish to be used in small amounts, incorporate as many fresh herbs into your food as possible. Think handfuls of herbs, not decorative sprinkles.

How are herbs grown?

For simplicity’s sake, you can divide ‘fresh’ (undried) herbs into three groups. First, there are the hardier more shrubby herbs, such as rosemary, thyme, lavender and bay. These thrive outdoors in the UK and can often continue to grow throughout the winter months. The second group is the more tender-leafed herbs such as basil, coriander, tarragon, chervil, dill, oregano, marjoram and sorrel, which flourish in Britain only in summer months. Somewhere between these two groups – depending on the local climate where they are grown – come chives, parsley, mint, lovage, fennel and sage. They will appear earlier and have a longer growing season outdoors than the most tender herbs, but a really cold snap will usually see them off.

For most of the year, the tender cut green herbs on sale in our supermarkets and greengrocers are imported by air from warmer countries, most commonly Israel, often Cyprus (especially flat parsley, mint and dill) and sometimes from Spain. From spring until autumn, most chains buy British herbs from milder areas of the UK and from the Channel Islands. Usually the more delicate herbs grown on any scale are cultivated under polytunnels, either to protect them from the heat of the sun or to shelter them from inclement weather, but herbs sold through outlets like farmers markets, farm shops or specialist herb suppliers may have been grown outdoors. Large-scale growers in both Britain and in Holland also cultivate herb plants for harvesting in the kitchen.

If you are trying to keep an eye on where your herbs are coming from, it can be quite confusing. Some UK herb packers have adopted geographical-sounding names which suggest that the herbs come from Britain all year round when in fact they are only growing their own herbs in summer and simply packing imported herbs the rest of the time. So use your common sense. Would a tender leaf like basil come from northern Britain in January? It’s highly unlikely, whatever the label might suggest.

Supermarket herbs state their country of origin on the label, but even this can be less than straightforward. Herbs grown on Israeli settlements in the Israeli-occupied Left Bank, or Palestine, are sometimes labelled as coming from the West Bank rather than Israel. West Bank herbs should not be considered as Palestinian or as an alternative source for people who prefer not to buy Israeli produce as a protest against Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

FOOD AS MEDICINE?

Although herbs have always featured among the culinary plants grown in Britain and Ireland, they were more commonly grown for medicinal purposes, everywhere from abbey cloisters to physic gardens. Other than parsley, fresh herbs rarely featured in any abundance in our cooking until the 1980s. Once seen as rarefied or specialist ingredients generally imported from sunnier climes, they now seem like a kitchen essential. This has opened up the market for herb growers in the UK and they are helping us to appreciate the range and diversity of herbs that can be grown here.

Are herbs a green choice?

Flying herbs thousands of miles just so we can make fresh pesto in December, or decorate dishes with chervil and mint in February, is environmental lunacy and contributes to unnecessary, avoidable carbon emissions. It is better to let your cooking be informed by the seasons. Hardier herbs like thyme and rosemary go well with heartier autumn and winter food and feel right for that time of year, while the fleshier, tender green herbs like dill, chives and chervil work best with lighter spring and summer ingredients.

Where and when should I buy herbs?

Tougher, hardier herbs like rosemary, thyme and bay can be grown outdoors in the UK year round so they can be considered as kitchen staples that are always at your disposal. British-grown tender green herbs like basil or chervil are available from June until September. The more prolific, vigorous home-grown green herbs like mint and chives have a slightly longer growing season from April through to October.

Will herbs break the bank?

Even though the pick-up price of fresh herbs may seem relatively small, herbs have some of the steepest mark-ups (several hundred per cent) of any food we buy. The retailer’s explanation for this is that they are highly perishable so wastage is high, but this is also true of salad leaves, which have much lower mark-ups. Another defence is that they are imported by air, which is expensive. However, as the price of herbs doesn’t vary much, if at all, throughout the year even when home-grown herbs are in prolific supply, this argument needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Whenever possible, buy herbs in Asian shops and supermarkets, from grocers specializing in Middle Eastern foods, or from farmers’ markets and farm shops. You will get a fistful of herbs for the cost of a few stems in the supermarket.

One way to get better value out of supermarket herb plants like basil and chives is to break each one up into much smaller clumps of roots and repot in new pots, giving them more space to grow. This will produce a more usable herb and more vigorous, healthy growth. Treated like this, a purchase of one herb plant can give you a summer’s worth of supply.

Despite their often high price, herbs can help you cook quite economically because they have the capacity to transform otherwise humdrum, cheap ingredients into something special. By using herbs to lend colour and flavour to your food, you can cut down on more expensive ingredients such as meat and cheese and make much more of vegetables, grains and pulses.