It gives an overview of the soil types needed, the aspect, and choosing what to grow. This would have been so useful when planning and planting my own patch, rather than juggling individual seed packets. It has all the principles you need to grow herbs too…’ Mark says that this chapter will ‘guide you through all you need to get the best from herbs in the kitchen, to capture their flavour, to preserve them, to know how and when to add them. You’ll be watching the match, chatting to a loved one, engrossed at the cinema, and a biplane will fly across your mind trailing a ribbon that says, ‘I wonder what that would be like on hot chips’ or ‘if I sprinkled that on a steak before frying as well as after…’. ‘Once in a while, an ingredient tugs at your collar.
‘This is fresher than Mae West after three gins.’ It is, like New Order’s ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’, as much uplifting as melancholy.’ ‘Much as I am unable to pass a football without inclining my foot towards it, I bend to every lavender plant and play the softest tug of war with its flowers to lend my hands its scent. ‘This is the brother of the bulb fennel – both Foeniculum vulgare – this one lanky, the other has the bigger arse: Laurel to the other’s Hardy.’ ‘I used to think of dill as I do Peter Cushing: cast in a few specific roles, for which only it will do.’ ‘Anise hyssop looks like the offspring of a one-night stand mint had with a nettle.’
A few examples (I could easily have included more): By the light of my bedside lamp I’m immersed in a scented border or over a pestle and mortar effusing potent aromas. Brought up with a reverence for books, I have an aversion to defacing them otherwise my pencil would be underlining great sections of his beautifully crafted passages. Mark Diacono is a new name to me even though he’s extolled as an ‘ award-winning (and green-fingered) food writer‘ on the jacket. While the recipes and ideas are inspiring for my glut of herbs, it’s the book I wish I’d had before I sent off for a single seed packet or dug my trowel into the soil. To describe Herb as just a cookbook is inaccurate, more a comprehensive guide to growing, harvesting and storing herbs as well as using them in the kitchen. Herb/a cook’s companion is a beautiful book to handle the hard cover is embossed with green leaves, it’s solid in my hands and very tactile. I need inspiration and advice for dealing with quantities that far exceed the sad, limp offerings of British supermarkets. The result has been mixed, I’ve learned a lot, some have not thrived, but I have a few herb varieties in abundance.
I scrounged a few cuttings, planted a lot of seeds in pots and sprinkled into the ground. Herb garden is probably a grand name for my tentative steps into horticulture a small bed with a few aromatic plants might be more accurate. Shoppers – both men and women – inspect every bunch, raising them to check the scent, the buoyancy of the leaves, the crispness of the stems and return them to the shelf with a look of disparagement if they fail the test. In part, this was a longing for the freshness, flavour and profusion I’ve become used to in Dubai. I made tentative plans for a herb garden, dug out a border and ordered some seeds. The unpredictable impact of the pandemic meant that a brief stay turned into a longer one without a firm end date in sight. It’s abundant with grassy knolls, wild meadow areas, an apple tree, hedges and flowers, but no edible plants. Since last Autumn, every time I’ve drawn the curtains I see a large garden. Herb/a cook’s companion by Mark Diacono falls firmly into the second category and couldn’t have come at a more perfect time. But the cookbooks that you put on your bedside to delve into more deeply, savouring the stories, slowly turning the pristine pages are the ones I treasure most. Opening a new cookbook on your kitchen table, tearing scraps of paper to mark the most tempting recipes is such a pleasure.
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