Twofer Flavors

You can use both the seed and the leaf of nearly all Europe’s native spice plants; for example, dill seed and dill weed, coriander and cilantro, mustard seed and mustard greens. Though celery seed has been a spice in its own right since Roman times, celery was originally grown for the leaves, which are still commonly used as an herb in Italian cookery.

Fennel and anise seeds are more popular than the greens, but the leaves do show up in garnishes. The same is true of caraway, the young leaves of which have a parsley-dill flavor quite unlike the taste of the seed. Caraway leaf was a common herb in the Middle Ages, and it is still used in such dishes as karvekal-suppe, a Norwegian cabbage soup.

Among the less common spice-or-herb flavorings are fenugreek and lovage, the favorite spice of the ancient Romans. The Romans also used bay tree seeds as a substitute for peppercorns. This was so common that our word “bay” actually somes from their name for the seeds, lauri baca.

Such dual-use flavoring plants scarcely exist outside Europe. The main exception is cinnamon--a cousin of the bay tree, come to think of it--which has a fragrant leaf (tejpat) used in Indian cookery. And if you want to get technical, the leaves of the clove tree can be distilled into oil of cloves, which is the basis of artificial vanilla.

Mysterious, huh? Well, no. It’s just that nearly all the native European spice plants, with the exception of mustard (and bay), belong to the carrot family, the Umbelliferae, which tend to have fragrant leaves. (Incidentally, though carrots themselves don’t rank very high in either the leaf or seed department, fragrant essences can be distilled from the leaves and flowers of carrot’s near relative the parsnip.)