By our friend Cat Sarsfield.

A Sunday read from the latest issue of the Sunday Paper.

IN PRAISE OF HERB ENDS

As a lover of all food, I refuse to single out one herb that I quote unquote hate. How could I hate something that a) nourishes my body and keeps me alive and/or b) is totally delicious (these may or may not be the same thing). But it’s 10.23pm on a Friday night, I’m two – very strong – vodka martinis deep, I’ve just emerged from a long discussion about the utterly terrifying state of the world, and I've decided that tarragon is a herb I could definitely live without.

In any case, I've made an otherwise chef's kiss meal. Crispy nuggets of sausage meat are nestled in perfectly cooked pieces of conchiglie pasta, scattered with torn parsley and stirred through with crunchy, coarse pesto. One that – owing to my occasional “try-anything-once” attitude – is mostly made from tarragon and is currently making me feel a little nauseous. To be frank.

Yet, I love herbs for this exact reason. Their intensity. Their polarity. Their nuance. If I asked you what a lemon tasted like you’d say sour, bitter. If I asked you what a chilli tasted like you’d say spicy. Fish is salt. Honey is sweet. But with a herb, you can’t definitively profile it in a word. It leaves a different taste in each mouth..

To some coriander is soap. To me it's an unforgivably hot day in India and Sri Lanka, quenched by salty and sour salads, the coriander so robust, so whole, it serves as a lettuce in and of itself. To others, dill is aniseed. To me it’s the soft fronds of a sea-soaked afternoon; of fresh fish cooked in nothing on top of heady wood fire and potatoes doused in butter. Some feel the furry softness of wild oregano and discard it. I think of the unruly bushes growing outside my shed in Cornwall, freshly picked every meal and torn into whipped ricotta or thrown on top of garden risotto. Chives hold that smooth allium flavour, perhaps disliked by onion or leek protestors are loved by me, and stirred into low and slow creamy scrambled eggs, the yolks brighter than orange juice and those perfect snips a green light to taste. Sage might be the dreaded smell of over-cooked roasts or saccharine pasta dishes; to me it’s the balance of sage colliding with chilli oil as an egg gets fried and leaves crisp up then become crystallised in its trembling whites.

Which brings me to now. I can smell anchovies. And mustard. And vinegar. A tart dressing. But what overwhelms my senses is the sweetness of the tarragon, which my pasta is drowned in. It's medicinal. Earthy. A fragrance I haven't yet grown into.

Perhaps one day I’ll come to love that smell. After many years have passed, that whiff of tarragon might remind me of a time in my life when I was loved and safe and warm and beautiful and had so much more to experience (and drunk?). When the flat upstairs held loud and not-technically-legal not-so-post-pandemic parties and played the same song on repeat. When I had the luxury of drinking alone and cooking dinner at 9pm while watching re-runs of Sex And The City in pyjamas that I'd not taken off all day.

A herb is a ‘doing’ leaf. It forces you to unearth its palate. To question what's in front of you. To activate your senses. To grow into its complexity. For now, tarragon is off the list. Then again, I used to say that about parsley.