In Elizabethan England, Henry Butte, a gourmet and scholar, experimented with flavour companions for dill. Here is one of his ideas:
Before cooking spinach, add a good handful of chopped dill to the leaves. Slice several shallots, green tops as well, and add these also. Then boil or steam the spinach mixture as usual. Try this served with a dob of butter on top and a trickle of lemon juice.
Dill is indigenous to the Mediterranean, and Southern Russia and Scandinavia, and is a very ancient herb. It was used often in the incantations and magic rites associated with protection from witchcraft. On St John’s Eve (23rd June) various herbs were smoked or dried in the holy fires lit to mark the festival period. These herbs were then taken back by the people to their homes, and hung there as protection from sorcerers, witches and the Evil Eye. Vervain, hypericum and yarrow were also used.
Many writers recommend sowing dill seed where the plants are to remain, for the herb can be difficult to transplant. I have never found it so. My own nursery pots of dill are all transplanted from seed boxes or punnets, and with ordinary care they will transplant once again to the garden without any casualties. Although the seed can be sown almost all the year, spring is the best time, because the plants will grow quickly during the hot weather to come.
Plant dill beside your cabbage patch in the vegetable garden. It helps the growth of carrot plants, too, but be sure to dig out the dill or, use it before it flowers: in bloom it can inhibit the growth ot the carrots, owing to chemical changes in the plant at that time. All these “companion plant” relationships can be traced to chemicals either taken or supplied by one plant with benefit to another. This field seems to me of increasing importance in its applications. Overcropped or depleted land could perhaps be brought back under cultivation earlier if we were able to use the gradually growing knowledge coming in from all parts of the world. Plants have interlocking economies just as important to them as our trade agreements are to us. “Reciprocal business” seems a wonderfully waste-free way of using these chemical-swopping activities, without having to add unnatural outside agents.
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