The first time I realized that traditional herb-food pairings were about more than just flavor, it felt like an enormous breakthrough. Of course I knew the common anecdotes about green salads helping with digestion…but the idea that certain herbs could actually help us digest particular foods? That seemed crazy.
It all started when I was reading Wolf D. Storl’s amazing book The Herbal Lore of Wise Women and Wortcunners, specifically, this paragraph:
“The kitchen herbs, easily grown in one’s garden or on the windowsill, are rich in flavors, vitamins, and ethereal oils and have very little bulk. Thus they are yang/cosmic/solar and can be used to balance out the heavy, bulky foods that give us our calories (carbohydrates and proteins) and are derived from the yin/terrestrial/lunar side.”
What Storl goes on to explain, are the many ways that culinary herbs help our bodies—specifically when it comes to the healthy digestion of the foods they’ve traditionally been paired with.
As it turns out, food-herb pairings are about more than flavor, and there’s very likely a biochemical reason our ancestors combined things like dill and fish, or chili and beans.
One of the many aspects of our cultural amnesia lies in our forgotten knowledge of plants1. While our great grandmothers knew (out of necessity) which herbs to pluck from the garden to treat certain ailments, the ease with which we go about our day-to-day lives (hello grocery stores!) doesn’t necessitate that same kind of knowledge.
Most of us no longer live off the land, and as a result— we’ve lost our collective plant wisdom. Part of my goal with this newsletter is to provide backstreets and byways through which you can rediscover the ancestral knowledge of your people and community. In this letter, we’ll dive into the forgotten history of three common kitchen herbs, as well as the biochemical rationale behind the foods we pair them with.
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