Herbs, Spices and Herbalists – Mint: Part 7 …

Tis coming up to Easter … the time of roast lamb, new potatoes glistening with butter and mint, mint sauce, home-made gravy, baby leeks, and new carrots … a delicious Easter lunch welcoming in the early Spring …

Garden Mint

… garden mint is not that convenient … desperately easy to grow, but incredibly keen to spread – keep it in a pot … however an essential for lamb and/or new potatoes – Jersey Royals perhaps …

Mint Jelly - so so good!

… yet the Lamiaceae (or Labiatae) is a ‘huge’ family of flowering plants commonly known as mint or deadnettle … they include Mentha, the strongly scented herbs, and include Peppermint and Spearmint … as well as many other varieties: apple mint, orange mint, pineapple mint …

Winter Savoury

To my surprise the Mint Family also includes a large number of herbs, lots of small shrubs and a few medium to very large trees … including basil, rosemary, thyme, savoury, lavender, sage, marjoram and others … also the tropical hardwood tree ‘teak’, which I would never have put into the ‘Mint family’ …

Jersey Royals simmered in Mint, tossed in butter,
sprinkled with parsley

We will concentrate on our Garden Mint … which George Orwell proclaimed that new potatoes simmered with mint and tossed in butter were superior to the fried potato dishes traditional in other countries … he has a point …

Jersey - highlighted in the Channel
Islands

… Keith from Keith’s Ramblings reminded me in my Boxty post that it can’t be long before the Jersey Royals are in the shops – heralding the start of Spring in a foodie way … the first outdoor produce from the warmer Channel Islands – that has led to this ‘Mint’ post …

Freshly made mint sauce

Pliny the Elder (AD 23 – August 25, AD 79) was keen on mint … ‘the smell of Mint doth stir up the minde, and the taste to a greedy desire of meat’, so it looks like mint sauce has been around for 2,000 years + and more I expect …

Mint is known to have originated in Asia and the Mediterranean region … the Greeks used it to clean their food tables, bathed with it … whilst the Romans used it in sauces, as an aid to digestion and as a mouth freshener.

Growing potatoes on Jersey
with Mont Orgueil castle in the back ground

Medieval monks developed further culinary and medicinal uses … as mint symbolised hospitality and was a welcome of friendship to guests.  The Jews strewed the floors of their synagogues with mint so that its clean and aromatic perfume scented the place as they entered to worship.

Shakespeare loved his plants and wove them into his tales … as here “The Winter’s Tale (Act 4, Scene 4):

"Hot lavender, mints savoury, marjoram,

The marigold, that goes to bed wi’ th’ sun

And with him rises weeping.  These are flowers

Of middle summer, and I think they are given

To men of middle age.”

Mint Chocolate Ice Cream

Mint goes with so many things … chopped mint and sugar on pineapple, or grapefruit slices – can I say chocolate – let’s move on … how about finely chopped mint with some sour cream, or cream cheese, served with a baked potato …

Mint leaves added to refreshing lemon water

… while at home as a deterrent for the ever present clothes-moth, or ants and the cabbage white caterpillar in the garden … then our bathrooms, our mouths … we would not be same without the tingle of our toothpaste cleansers …

Twinings Mint Tea

So here’s to Mint – enjoy a cup of mint tea, a cool glass of minted lemonade, or mint water … peppermint is a native to these shores … and is good for indigestion … I will not make an obvious link to Brexit …

Rack of Lamb with Mint Sauce

… but I am looking forward to British Spring Lamb, with new potatoes, mint sauce and freshly dug vegetables … simple foods that nature provides from the earth …

Melon Salad - so refreshing in summer
with the sprinkling of chopped mint

One final idea – a recipe I came upon as I was starting out in life which inspired my love of herby bread – that’s a standard when I cook – how about a melon salad … melon, cucumber, tomato pieces … with a vinaigrette of choice, fresh chopped parsley, chives and mint to sprinkle over … served with the herby bread – oh so good!!

Hilary Melton-Butcher

Positive Letters Inspirational Stories

Herbs, Spices and Herbalists – part 2: Early Gardens …

Early gardens in the forests or wooded glades became essential once tribes settled … we can then see the enormous change up to the house-lands of Egypt, where thousands of slaves tended the gardens at Thebes and Luxor, or the parks of the first Emperors of China were landscaped with steps, terraces and walkways.

Early forest garden

We learnt of influences from Persian gardening – the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; the Greeks had gardens; the most influential ancient gardens in the western world were the Ptolemy gardens at Alexandria …

Hand Coloured Engraving .... of the Hanging Gardens

The Romans built extensive villa gardens with water features, topiary, and cultivated roses with shaded arcades … archaeological evidence survives at some sites … Tivoli and at Pompeii.  Byzantium and Moorish Spain developed their own styles ….

English landscape

Finally in Europe gardening came to the fore as a necessary part of civilised life … we needed to feed ourselves and the wealthy needed to show us what could be done with plants.

With exploration came more plants … the world opened up …

Reconstruction of the House of Vettii in
Pompeii

But going back to those early roots - the Roman vegetable garden was an essential … an array of plants used for food, medicines, dyes, perfumes and for religious shrines and ceremonies were appropriately planted.

Plane trees in London - providing shade

We find that the sycamore or plane tree was cultivated to provide shade and stature in a garden, or courtyard … the idea of a tree being useful for nothing - but offering a place to sit in the shade seemed a bit decadent to the conservative Romans – but the Greek philosophers liked nothing better … the agora a central place or square where free-born citizens could gather to converse …

Probably the first cultivated plants were from the Allium family – the leeks, onions and garlics … one of the oldest recipes found on a 4,000 year old Babylonian tablet was for a leek and lamb stew … passed down to the Greeks, the Arabs and the Romans.

Palace de Generalife, Granada,
Spain

Early remedies were written down, some dating back over 5,000 years to the Sumerians, who created lists of plants.  This trend continued with the herbalists, botanists, simplers … who noted, tried and tested what we could eat or what would help us.

Some plants had more than one use and these were noted … we owe a lot to those early ‘tasters’ and plantsmen … who forayed into the wonderful world of plants recording for posterity their ideas and thoughts.

Garden Fresco from Tomb of Nebamun,
Thebes - showing pond in the garden
(1350 BC)

We are so fortunate today … that the scientists and herbalists keep experimenting and trying new ideas to enhance our nutrition, and improve our health …

Sumerian Tablet recording allocations
of beer - about 3000 BC

In many ways gardening is a metaphor for life – we need patience and faith … unless we put the work in, the garden won’t have a chance of flourishing, fresh food will improve our bodies … while working the soil will make sure we exercise and get that fresh air for our lungs …

English allotment

We are fortunate to live in a world where we can help ourselves to a greater or lesser degree … and in being out and about we can help others.

After all that gardening - we'll need a drink

An extra note ... Linda "From Roses to Rainbow" has just written a post about the Greeks, Romans and Beer ... a good mix to add to this post ... 

Hilary Melton-Butcher

Positive Letters Inspirational Stories

Herbs, Spices and Herbalists … brief history part 1 … and to start us off Asparagus …

In this series I shall be exploring the history of:

Herbs and Spices

… some herbs: the ‘grasses’ (Latin ‘herba’) or green crop that we know and use today as a leaf vegetable or in lesser quantities as herbs …

… spices: the products of tropical plants, aromatic roots, bark, seeds, buds, and fruits, usually in dried form, whether whole of ground.  Again the word derives from Latin … the Romans considered spices an important commodity …

Botanical aspects of Asparagus

… and herbalists – brief notes on interesting botanists, natural scientists, early recipes arising from travellers … many of whom would necessarily be peripatetic.

As it’s Asparagus season here in the UK – it appears (dependent on the weather) on St George’s Day (23^rd April), or Shakespeare’s birth/death and continues til the Summer Solstice … it is a short six week - eight period of deliciousness!

Ready to cook ... 

It’s an amazing plant which has been used as a vegetable and medicine, particularly as a diuretic, for more than 5,000 years: it appears on an Egyptian frieze.

It has been eaten in season, and dried for use in winter, while the Romans even froze it high in the Alps, for the Feast of Epicurus - a date during the winter month of January.

De  re Coquinaria

Emperor Augustus created the “Asparagus Fleet” just for collecting the vegetable – as he liked to eat it all the year round, and coined the expression “faster than cooking asparagus” for quick action – gosh they’d have had to react very quickly!

A recipe for cooking asparagus is in the oldest surviving book of recipes: Apicius’s 3^rd C AD De re Coquinaria, Book III.

The Glory of the Perfumed Garden

The plant drew little attention until the Middle Ages and al-Nafzawi’s “The Perfumed Garden”.  That piece of writing celebrates its (scientifically unconfirmed) aphrodisiacal power … I leave you to read all about it!

It is 93% water, low in calories and is very low in sodium … it’s the additions we add to asparagus that make it not so healthy – lots of butter, hollandaise sauce, or a cheesey topping …

Parmesan and breadcrumb coated ...

For any gardeners: it thrives in soils that are too saline for normal weeds to grow … but don’t salt your soil, otherwise nothing else will grow!    Move house so that asparagus can thrive by the sea?!  I hadn’t realised it was a maritime plant – that likes to grow by the seaside - where it originated from …

Here are some other health benefits
according to Healthy Food Science.

In England we tend to favour the green asparagus, not the white asparagus of Continental north western Europe … but both are considered delicacies.

This is the start of a Herb and Spice series that I shall write … as and when, interspersing these posts with others that I get around to write …


The health benefits of asparagus poster was posted by Jo On Food, Life and Bowling ... she posts wonderful recipes on her blog.


Part 2 will be on the history of gardening ... 

Hilary Melton-Butcher

Positive Letters Inspirational Stories