Tarragon Artemisia dracunculus
French tarragon cannot be grown from seed. If a packet offers you tarragon seed, it is the Russian kind, and it tastes of almost nothing.
Ingredient reference image: AI-generated. Recipe photography is my own.
In the kitchen
It is the spine of béarnaise
Tarragon, shallot and vinegar reduced together is what makes béarnaise béarnaise rather than hollandaise. Leave it out and you have made a different sauce.
Fines herbes
One of the four classical French fines herbes with parsley, chervil and chives. All four are soft herbs and all four go in at the very end, which is the whole logic of the mixture.
Use half what you think
Tarragon is far more assertive than its delicate look suggests, and anise notes build as a dish sits. Season lightly, taste after five minutes, and add more only then.
Beyond the kitchen
THE LITTLE DRAGON
Both the French estragon and the Latin dracunculus mean little dragon, generally attributed to the coiled, serpentine look of its roots. The name has carried across languages for centuries.
TARHUN
In Georgia and across the Caucasus, tarragon flavours a bright green soft drink called tarhun, invented by a Tbilisi pharmacist in the 1880s. It remains a genuinely popular drink across the region.
A WORMWOOD RELATIVE
Artemisia is the genus that also contains wormwood and mugwort, plants long associated with bitter liqueurs and with absinthe. Tarragon is the mild, culinary member of an otherwise fierce family.
IT DOES NOT TRAVEL
Because French tarragon must be propagated vegetatively, its spread depended entirely on people carrying cuttings. That is a large part of why it is deeply embedded in French cooking and thinly present almost everywhere else.
A longer history
Tarragon is native to Eurasia, probably Siberia and western Asia, and reached the Mediterranean world comparatively late — classical Greek and Roman writers barely mention it, unlike almost every other herb in this section. It appears in Arab agricultural writing by the thirteenth century.
It arrived in France in the late Middle Ages and found a permanent home there. French cooking built a set of dishes around it that exist nowhere else in the same form: béarnaise, poulet à l'estragon, fines herbes, sauce gribiche and much of classical bistro cookery.
Its sterility shaped its geography. Because the good variety cannot be sown, it moved only where people carried cuttings, which is why it is fundamental in France, significant in the Caucasus and Iran, and comparatively marginal elsewhere in Europe and in the Americas.