Rosemary Salvia rosmarinus
Turns a stew resinous if you leave a whole sprig in and forget it. Either strip and chop the needles, or fish the sprig out.
Ingredient reference image: AI-generated. Recipe photography is my own.
In the kitchen
One sprig, not three
Rosemary overwhelms faster than any other herb in the rack. A single sprig will flavour a whole leg of lamb or a pot of beans; a handful makes everything taste like a pine forest and cannot be undone.
Fat and fire
Its oils are fat-soluble and it stands up to direct heat better than any soft herb. Roast it under a joint, fry it in the oil at the start, throw stems on the coals. In a watery soup it gives up comparatively little.
Use the stem
Stripped woody stems make good skewers for lamb or chicken and perfume the meat from inside as it cooks. Soak them first if they are going over a live fire.
Beyond the kitchen
REMEMBRANCE
Rosemary for remembrance is older than Hamlet, where Ophelia says the line. It was carried at both funerals and weddings across early modern Europe, and Australians and New Zealanders still wear a sprig on Anzac Day, a custom traced to the rosemary growing wild on the Gallipoli peninsula.
EAU DE COLOGNE
Rosemary is a backbone note in the herbal end of perfumery and one of the components of Hungary Water, a fourteenth-century alcohol-based scent generally described as the first modern European perfume.
NATURAL PRESERVATIVE
Rosemary extract is approved as a food antioxidant in the EU and elsewhere, where it slows fats going rancid. It appears on a great many ingredient lists as antioxidant: extract of rosemary, doing a preservative job rather than a flavouring one.
HEDGING AND EROSION
Drought-tolerant and happy in poor soil, it is planted widely for low hedging and slope stabilisation in Mediterranean climates, including across California. Prostrate cultivars are grown as bank cover on roadsides.
A longer history
Rosemary grows wild on the limestone coasts of the Mediterranean and its Latin name — ros marinus, dew of the sea — describes exactly where you find it. It was in use across the classical Mediterranean and turns up in Greek and Roman writing on gardens, scent and ritual rather than mainly on cooking.
It has an unusually rich symbolic history in Europe: associated with memory and fidelity, carried by mourners and by brides, burned as a fumigant in sickrooms, and planted at doorways. Hungary Water, from the fourteenth century, made it the base of the first widely recorded alcohol-based European perfume, and its legend attached to Elizabeth of Hungary.
As a kitchen herb it is most at home in the western Mediterranean — Provence, Liguria, Catalonia, central Italy — almost always with lamb, pork, bread or beans, and almost always used with restraint. Its reputation as the herb people overdo is a modern one, and mostly the fault of the garden centre plant that grows faster than anyone can use it.