Mint Mentha spp.
Spearmint for food, peppermint for sweets and drinks. Using the wrong one is why a salad can taste faintly of toothpaste.
Ingredient reference image: AI-generated. Recipe photography is my own.
In the kitchen
Tear it, off the heat
A soft herb with volatile oils. Heat flattens it and a knife bruises it. Tear the leaves at the last moment and stir them in once the pan is off, or scatter them at the table.
Dried mint is its own thing
Unlike most herbs, mint dries well and is used deliberately dried across Turkey, Iran and the Levant — rubbed between the palms into yoghurt, soups and meat. It is not a fallback for fresh.
It belongs in savoury food
Anglophone cooks file mint under lamb sauce and desserts. Across the Middle East, North Africa, Vietnam and India it is an everyday savoury herb, used by the handful in salads, rice and with grilled meat.
Beyond the kitchen
MENTHOL
Menthol, the compound behind the cooling sensation, does not actually lower temperature — it binds to the same receptor that detects cold. Your mouth reports cold that is not there. It is used across confectionery, oral care and tobacco.
AN ENORMOUS INDUSTRY
Mint is grown at industrial scale for oil rather than for leaf, with the United States and India the major producers. Almost all of it ends up in toothpaste, chewing gum, sweets and cigarettes rather than in food.
PEST DETERRENT
Mint is a long-standing household deterrent for ants and mice, and mint oil appears in commercial repellents. Planted at a doorway it does something; planted in a border it does something to the whole border.
THE NYMPH
In Greek myth Minthe was a nymph transformed into the plant by a jealous Persephone. Mint appears in Egyptian records, in the Bible among the tithed herbs, and throughout classical writing on gardens and banquets.
A longer history
Mint has been in use around the Mediterranean and Near East for thousands of years. It is named in Egyptian records, recovered from Egyptian tombs, and listed in the New Testament among the herbs the Pharisees tithed — alongside dill and cumin — which places it firmly as an ordinary cultivated crop of first-century Judea.
Greek and Roman writers describe it constantly, and Pliny recommends it strewn on floors at banquets for the scent released underfoot. It spread through Europe with Roman cultivation and monastic gardens, and its extraordinary ease of propagation meant it never needed much help.
Peppermint, the hybrid, was only formally identified in England in the seventeenth century, and its commercial cultivation for oil built an industry that now dwarfs the culinary trade. Mint remains central to Middle Eastern, North African, South Asian and Vietnamese cooking, where it is treated as a salad green rather than a garnish.