How is it, you may have wondered, that plants and various herbs which were used for cures in the long, long ago, before modern medical science, often turn out to be validated by today's orthodox medicine. Richard Mabey gives various clues to possible answers in the current issue of the BBC Wildlife magazine.
But herbs are good for you, even if you don't take them for medicinal purposes. There is hardly a dish they do not improve - especially if you use them in plenty, and grow them for yourself. A green salad, for example, can be lifted onto another plane if you use a good mix such as savory, flat leaved parsley, chervil, hyssop, burnet and, say, woodruff. Yes, altogether, torn or chopped or cut with scissors into small fragments. Next day another mixture. (You need to keep on sowing or keep on buying in pots. And in that case to see that you pot them on and keep a good compost always by you.)
Chervil is probably the most underrated of herbs. Delicate in flavour, but it is tough, enduring even frost. it's not a matter of how good the individual herbs are; it's the fact that they add jump and life to your food, and if you enjoy your food, it's bound to do you good, more than stuff indifferently thrown down your gullet. Use them in salads, as above, but also in scrambled eggs, in roasts and stews, over your potatoes and in the mash. Even, in the case of the milder ones, say chervil, in sandwiches. Not as flavouring but as the main filling. In place of the thin triangular cucumber sandwich of polite tea parties. And the other good thing to give thanks for is honey. To put on bread or biscuits if you like, or in your coffee, or over your cereals or in your yogurt as the Greeks do. You can even buy yogurt with the honey added. Some holy honey has recently arrived from France. One pot from the Abbaye de Senanque in the Vaucluse. Honeymaking seems to go with quiet piety. The other marked as being from the Priory of Serrabone in the Pyrenees.
Not that we don't have good honey of our own, though Sean Cronin of Rathgar thinks that heather honey is scarce this year. It's often the best. Anyway Dubliners will have the opportunity of picking from a good selection when the County Dublin Beekeepers Association hold their annual honey show in Christ Church, Rathgar, Dublin on this Saturday from 2 pm to 5 pm. That's at the corner of Rathgar Road and Highfield Road. And there's a craft exhibition with an amazing range: basketwork, ceramics, fishing flies, and lots more, as well as all the honey and other bee products. £1 entrance for the RNLI. Irish Lifeboats. Graham Hall, 4754433 (office) 280303.
Don't know if any of it comes from abbeys or priories, but it's always been good stuff.