A wealthy person 100 years ago would dismiss most of the food we want to eat today as "poverty tucker". Who wants a flat piece of bread with tomato, a scatter of cheese and thin slices of preserved meat (pizza) when you could have roast boar?
Pasta is the food of the poor too, as are our stir-fries, vegetable curries, even pad thai, made delicious with herbs and spices. While only a few spices thrive in our region, herbs do wonderfully.
Herbs had their place in my great-grandma's kitchen - thyme, winter savoury and sage was stuffed up the rear end of a roast chicken; mint went in the fruit salad and a branch of rosemary was draped over the mutton roasting in the oven, especially if you were going to eat bread and mutton dripping the next day. Parsley sat on the side of the plate when you were being fancy. That was it.
I need to add here that great-grandma was also one of the finest cooks I've known, her fruit cakes and Anzac biscuits famous through World War I, her scones unrivalled and her lemon-stuffed shoulder of mutton, with crisp potatoes, caramelised pumpkin and rich gravy enough to make a TV chef weep. But she'd have taken one sniff of basil, Vietnamese mint or coriander and fed them to the chooks.
This is not the time to plant basil in our climate, unless you're content with a few leaves to harvest shared with the snails. But it's an excellent time to plant coriander, lots of it, so it's a froth of delicious green before winter's chill stops it growing. Feed and water well for fast growth, and give your coriander as much heat and sunlight as you can this year. (In a drought year, give it dappled shade).
Plant parsley, too, so you can eat warm beetroot, parsnip, fetta and parsley salad to cheer you up on cold grey days, or add finely chopped parsley to the compulsory cure-anything home-made chicken soup.
I grow winter savoury because I was taught to cook with it - no stuffing was properly made without some of its tiny tough leaves stripped off the stalk, just as no chicken stew had the right flavour without a bundle of thyme and winter savoury stalks tied up and left to simmer, then poked out before the stew was served. (Casserole is just stew served in pot that's fancy enough to put on the dining table). A branch of winter savoury was traditionally added to a pot of simmering dried beans, ostensibly to stop the beans making your intestines imitate the release of air from an overfilled balloon, but I suspect more for the flavour a pot of dried beans needs.
Winter savoury looks very much like thyme, and needs the same conditions, a spot to itself and lots of sun to give the leaves intense flavour. Like thyme, savoury produces masses of tiny flowers, but you need a heck of a lot of savoury or thyme plants to be spectacular.
The stems are straighter than thyme's are, and the leaves easier to peel off, and much more flavourful. Once you begin to use it you'll be addicted. Winter savoury is the reason people who've asked for my chicken soup recipe claim theirs never tastes as good - they are not adding fresh-picked winter savoury. It also adds a stunning subtlety to rice and pasta dishes, and anything with tomato. If you are missing basil this winter, go for savoury.
This is also time to stock up on thyme. (This pun is compulsory for garden writers). Sniff thyme before you buy it - some are almost flavourless. Orange and carraway thyme are as tough as winter savoury, and as aromatic. I grow both my thymes and winter savoury next to the path lined with concrete pavers - the extra heat and reflected light gives fragrance even in mid-winter.
Vietnamese mint is luckily almost unkillable, as long as it gets enough water. Rosemary is one of the few reliable winter bloomers in our climate, and it keeps its flavour too - no one has ever accused a rosemary bush of being flavorless, even the varieties grown for their prolific blooms or prostate shape rather than their taste. A rosemary hedge is a joy, till one bush dies and spoils the entire thing. Rosemary bushes can die if they grow "woody" from not being pruned to promote new growth, or being pruned too hard down the stem past the leaves, so the branch dies back and the rot spreads, or in extremely severe frosts, or if the soil becomes cold and water-logged.
None of these happen often - rosemary is definitely a herb for non-green fingers - but are still a potential disaster if you get carried away by the joy of rosemary and begin to think of hedges.
Feeling more adventurous? Try salad burnet, a small delicate plant with cucumber-scented stems and tender salad leaves. The best cheese and salad sandwich I ever ate had salad burnet chopped among the greens, a subtle richness I couldn't identify till the sandwich creator showed me what was inside. It may have been the ingredient that promoted a kangaroo to seize the sandwich from Val's hand, then slowly lick the mayonnaise from our fingers, looking for the last of the taste.
Salad burnet also goes gloriously chopped finely with baked beetroot, beetroot salad, potato salad and much else. It grows easily, gives you as much harvest as you give it tucker, but doesn't like to be crowded - give it space and sun and plenty of watering. It can be a new and delicious addition to winter.
Gourmet gardeners might like to add sorrel too, especially red-veined and ornamental sorrel. Unless you have a passion for sorrel sauce for fish or sorrel soup, only a small amount of tender leaf is needed to add a sour depth to anything sweet and creamy, including beetroot salad yet again. I do hope we get enough sun for the beetroot to mature before winter.
Much of winter's drabness is the loss of garden scents - no freshly mown grass, far fewer flowers, and none of the faint pervasive fragrance of new leaves. Add herbs to you garden, your cooking and your life, and all three will be richer.
This week I am:
- Planting out the coriander and spring onion seedlings for winter bounty.
- Trying to remember to feed the young citrus trees, growing lushly with all the rain, but with leaves that are too pale and clearly in need of tucker.
- Picking flesh-pink belladonnas, otherwise known as naked ladies, to be arranged with the dark green of bay leaves in the vases.
- Hopefully saying farewell to the giant pine tree that was sold to me as a Mexican stone pine to produce edible pine kernels. It had grown to 15 metres before we realised it isn't a Mexican stone pine. It's also shading the chook shed too much. Time for the professional tree loppers.
- Pushing my way past the blue salvia hedge by the front door. The blue salvias stayed well behaved during the drought, blooming copiously, but they are now crowding the path to the vegie garden, though still flowering away (the bees adore it).
- Reminding myself that every bud on the camellias may not produce a flower, while still looking forward to all their abundance from autumn through to spring.
