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Herbs

  • Jul 23
  • 5 min read

"Herbs bypass our thinking, analytical minds and go straight to our hungry souls." Nikky Duffy


Herbs have a special place in my heart - not just because they are virtually the only plants that I seem to be able to grow - something which Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall highlights in his introduction to this, my first recipe book for today:


"Herbs can be the plants that make you into a gardener, even a very small-scale one, and the ingredients that turn you into a creative cook. They are so easy to grow and so simple to use that they form an irresistible first step on a road to self-sufficiency."


Possibly it's because my name is a herb and indelibly connected to that wonderful Shakespeare line:


"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember."


And memory - how it works - and increasingly doesn't work - has long been an abiding interest for me.


So here are just a few random thoughts and recipes on herbs - the next first recipe book on my shelf - another in the River Cottage Handbooks collection. It's by Nikky Duffy - a River Cottage collaborator - and is not quite as awkwardly British as some of the others. Awkwardly in the sense that the subject matter - British beaches, hedgerows, etc. -being very British, is full of things that are not available here. No, this one is about herbs - European rather than from the rest of the world I guess - but familiar to anyone who cooks. There a few - e.g. hyssop - which are somewhat unfamiliar - but the only one that I had never heard of was perilla - but I'm wrong - I just know it by a different name, which I discovered when I read her introduction to the page on which she has written about perilla and saw that it is also known as shiso - which we, of course, know from Australia's love of Japanese food. It's apparently related to basil and mint, although I have to say it doesn't look much like either of them. To me it looks more like a purple kind of rocket or chicory. She tells us that it is 'sweetly pungent with a distinct note of cumin' and gives a recipe for aubergines with perilla, for which, alas, there is no recipe online.



Going back to memory; in her introduction Nicky Duffy says:


"Those intense penetrating aromas send messages directly to the limbic system, the parts of our brain that deals with emotion and memory. One thread of scent can cause the mind to retrieve distinct images, but also more fugitive recollections and feelings that can completely alter our mood."


Proust and all of that. I'm not sure that I am particularly susceptible to smell, but I can definitely concur that certain herbs - the very names - can evoke memories of a particular place, or view - fields and fields of lavender for example that you see everywhere in summer in Southern France.


I suspect lavender may be a favourite of Nikki Duffy's - there is a rather beautiful double spread of a lavender flowers growing in a meadow just inside the cover of the book. For me it's possibly the very first plant that I grew all on my own as a child. My father, I think, showed me how to take a cutting and place it in the ground - which I did - and lo and behold a lavender bush grew and prospered in a relatively short space of time. Magic to a small child. I even tried here and it did work for a bit, but alas not for very long. My baby bush died.


However, I also remember one of the most delicious - no - the most delicious crème brulée that I have eaten in my life. A lavender crème brulée - not this Lavender crème brulée from a website called Lavender and Macarons, but it looked very similar. We ate it in a small restaurant in a village called Ansignan famous for the Roman aqueduct nearby - where we dined one night during our week with close friends in the Pyrenees. It was remote, and the roads wound their way around the edges of precipitous mountains. The dish was so delicious that we tried to book another meal there in spite of the alarming drive, but alas it was fully booked.


Lavender also reminds me of another French village - Taulignan - this one in Provence - where as we arrived we found the whole village was celebrating the local lavender festival, and where our rented house overlooked lavender fields.



Nikky Duffy offers us Lemon and lavender biscuits, which look delicious, but the recipe is not online, although plenty of similar recipes do indeed exist.


Another quote from her introduction is that:


"Herbs invite experimentation, and rarely make you suffer for it."


As she says - too many herbs is not at all the same as too much salt or too much chilli. And Madhur Jaffrey's recipe for Chicken in green sauce - her version of Murgh Methi, is an example of this experimentation, for she introduces her recipe thus:


"This dish is nothing short of inspired. The only problem with it is that it requires fenugreek greens - or methi. ... I have substituted the equally popular dill for the fenugreek greens. The dish remains wonderful and should, perhaps, be called Murgh sooa."


It is indeed wonderful, and I wrote about it long ago - Green herbs, chicken and Madhur Jaffrey - I even once made a version of it with fenugreek which suddenly appeared at the Queen Vic Market and I have to say I preferred the dill version. But the other thing that is sort of special about this recipe is that there are a lot of herbs - coriander as well as dill and they are only stirred into the dish right at the end. This was a revelation to me as it is a way of really getting a hit of whatever herb you are using. It's a technique that I often use these days.

The original dish looked a bit like this Methi chicken (American Kahani), but greener as the herbs were blended with a green chilli to almost a purée.



I know that this is a first recipe post, but the first recipe - Béchamel sauce - followed by several other well-known sauces, have been written about before. Well I'm pretty certain they have, so I'm just giving you her recipe for Basil and parsley pesto which, yes, is just pesto - and isn't it wonderful that I can say 'just' pesto? - but it is a mix of parsley with the basil, and she also has other pesto suggestions as well.


Pesto is such a part of everyday life these days is it not? How did we manage without it?


A rather lovely book - if nothing else it brought back some lovely memories - as herbs do.


YEARS GONE BY

July 23

2021 - Missing

2020 - Missing

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Jul 23
Rated 4 out of 5 stars.

"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember." It is all in a name and it's your name, Rosemary. 🥰

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