Dill
Also known as dill weed, dried dill, dillweed, aneth, shibit, suva
Quick answer
The feathery leaf of the same plant that gives dill seed, and a genuinely different ingredient from it. The leaf is grassy and delicate; the seed is sharp and caraway-like, and neither substitutes for the other.
- Tastes of
- grassy, cooling, faintly aniseed, citric, clean
- Heat
- Scoville does not apply
- If you have none
- Dill — see the limits
Other names
What this spice is called elsewhere, and where the translation is not clean.
dill
Swedish
ukropукроп
Russian
koper
Polish
anithosάνηθος
Greek
shevid
Persian
suva
Hindi
In South Asia suva or sowa most often means the seed rather than the leaf, and the two are used quite differently.
shibit
Arabic
Flavour and aroma
Light, green and cooling, with a faint sweetness and none of the sharp warmth of the seed. Dill leaf is a finishing herb: it has very little that survives cooking and a great deal that arrives immediately.
Grassy, faintly citric and slightly aniseed, with a clean cool quality that is distinctive and hard to describe by comparison to anything else. It is considerably gentler than dill seed.
Fresh dill is blue-green and feathery. Dried dill ranges from khaki to a bright green that indicates freeze-drying.
Taste, smell and sensation, channel by channel
Smell, taste and the chemical sense of heat and cold are different senses. Each is listed with the compounds evidenced as producing it.
Smell
- Citrus — Limonene
The chief components of dill herb oil are phellandrene, about 35 per cent, and dill ether, about 25. An American dill weed oil carried limonene, 32 per cent, and carvone, 28, beside α-phellandrene at 27 and dill ether at 5. Limonene and carvone together are about 95 per cent of the seed oil.
Fresh fronds are soft and wilt within seconds of hitting heat. Dried dill is a very light flake that all but disappears into a sauce.
Heat
Pungency scale: none — this spice is not pungent
No heat, and a faint cooling quality.
- α-Phellandrene — The dominant volatile in the leaf and the source of its grassy, faintly citric character. It is largely absent from the seed, which is the compound-level reason the two are different ingredients.
- Dill ether — A compound essentially specific to dill and responsible for the note nobody can compare to anything else. Its presence is what makes dill unmistakable.
- Carvone — Dominant in the seed and present in far smaller proportion in the leaf. The more the leaf matures, the more carvone it carries and the more it starts to taste like the seed.(what carvone is)
- Limonene — Citric lift.(what limonene is)
Pairings
Ranked by how well established the combination is, with the reason and the caveats attached.
Foods
Salmon
ClassicGravlax is the argument: salmon buried in salt, sugar and a great deal of dill for two days. Oily fish carries fat-soluble aromatics well and needs something to cut its richness, and dill’s grassy coolness does that without the anise character fennel would bring.
How: Packed onto a side of salmon with salt and sugar for curing; Stirred through a cream or mustard sauce
Add alongside: Mustard seed, Lemon, Black pepper
- Fresh dill is destroyed by cooking. It goes on at the end or into the cure.
Potato
ClassicNew potatoes with butter and dill is a fixed dish across Scandinavia, Russia and Ukraine, and the quantities used there startle visitors — dill by the handful rather than the sprig. Potato is starchy and quiet, butter carries the aromatics, and dill supplies the only flavour in the dish.
How: Tossed with new potatoes and butter; Through a potato salad with soured cream
Add alongside: Black pepper, Mustard seed, Yoghurt
Cod
StrongLean white fish has too little fat to carry a heavy aromatic, and dill is one of very few herbs light enough to season it without taking over. Northern European cooking pairs the two constantly, usually through butter or a cream sauce that supplies the fat the fish does not have.
How: In a butter or cream sauce over the fillet; Scattered over with lemon after cooking
Add alongside: White pepper, Mustard seed
- Fresh dill only. The dried herb has lost the lift that makes this work.
Beetroot
StrongThe eastern European pairing, and the one on top of a bowl of borscht. Dill is cool and grassy where beetroot is earthy and sweet, and it goes on raw at the end because nothing of it survives the cooking the beetroot needed.
How: Scattered over borscht with soured cream; Through a beetroot and yoghurt salad
Add alongside: Horseradish, Black pepper, Yoghurt
Eggs
StrongEggs are rich, sulfurous and mild, and they take a fresh green herb better than almost any other ingredient. Dill appears with them across Iran in kuku, in eastern European omelettes and in Greek pies, and its coolness sits against the fat without the peppery edge of parsley.
How: In a kuku or a herb omelette; Through scrambled eggs off the heat
Add alongside: Cheese, Black pepper, Turmeric
Other spices and blends
Parsley
ClassicOne of the most widely used herb pairs in the world and almost never thought about, because parsley is doing a structural job rather than a flavouring one: it supplies green, slightly bitter bulk that gives dill something to sit on. Georgian, Persian, Levantine, Russian and Scandinavian cooking all rely on it, most visibly in the Persian herb stews and in Georgian pkhali.
How: Both fresh and chopped, in enormous quantity; Both dried, in khmeli suneli
Add alongside: Mint, Coriander leaf
Chives
StrongThe two herbs of the northern European dairy tradition, and the pairing that gives ranch seasoning its identity. Dill is sweet and grassy, chives faintly oniony, and neither is strong enough to argue with the other — which is what lets both be used generously against soured cream, buttermilk or curd cheese without the mixture becoming muddy.
How: In ranch seasoning; Stirred into soured cream or quark; With smoked fish
Add alongside: Parsley, Garlic
- Dried dill weed rather than dill seed; the seed is a pickling spice and tastes of caraway
Garlic
StrongA combination that turns up independently in American ranch, in Greek tzatziki, in Levantine yoghurt sauces and in eastern European pickling — and in every case with dairy or acid alongside. Dill is sweet and volatile, garlic heavy and sulphurous, and the acid is what stops the second overwhelming the first.
How: In ranch seasoning; In tzatziki; In a dill pickle brine
Add alongside: Chives, Black pepper
- Raw garlic against dill needs acid or dairy; without either it dominates
Mint
StrongTwo cooling herbs that cool differently — dill through a soft anise sweetness, mint through menthol, which acts on the trigeminal nerve rather than on taste. Because the mechanisms differ the effect stacks rather than duplicating, which is why the pair is standard in yoghurt preparations from Georgia through Turkey to the Levant.
How: Stirred into yoghurt with garlic; Both dried, in khmeli suneli
Mustard seed
StrongThe Scandinavian pairing, and the basis of the sweet mustard-and-dill sauce that accompanies gravlax. Mustard supplies pungency and emulsifying power; dill supplies the green cooling note, and the sugar and vinegar between them hold it together.
How: In a hovmästarsås with sugar and vinegar; Together in a pickling brine
Add alongside: Salmon, Black pepper
Blue fenugreek
StrongDill supplies the fresh, grassy anise note and blue fenugreek the roasted-nut depth beneath it, which is close to the whole architecture of Georgian herb seasoning: something bright on top of something dusty. Both are used dried, which is unusual for dill and is what makes the pairing hold together rather than the dill flying off on its own.
How: Dried, in khmeli suneli
Add alongside: Coriander seed, Savory
- Fresh dill is a different ingredient here and does not substitute
Marigold
StrongMarigold petal — imeretian saffron — is used in Georgia for a warm, slightly resinous aroma and for colour, and it is one of very few ingredients that gives dried dill a background without covering it. The two are near-inseparable in Georgian mixtures and essentially unknown together anywhere else, which makes this a genuinely regional judgement rather than a general one.
How: Ground together into khmeli suneli
Add alongside: Coriander seed, Blue fenugreek
- Marigold is not saffron and contributes no crocin-derived flavour
Savory
GoodSavory is peppery and slightly resinous — it carries carvacrol, the compound that makes oregano pungent — and dill is sweet and volatile, so savory provides a bite dill does not have. The combination is Georgian and Balkan rather than Western European, where savory has largely fallen out of use.
How: Both dried, in khmeli suneli; With beans, where savory is traditional
Add alongside: Blue fenugreek
Shares a blend
Spices that appear alongside dill in the core ingredients of a blend profiled here. That is a record of established use rather than a recommendation, and it carries no proportions.
Together in Khmeli suneli, Adjika.
Together in Khmeli suneli.
Together in Khmeli suneli.
Together in Ranch seasoning.
Together in Adjika.
Together in Khmeli suneli.
Together in Ranch seasoning.
Salt and savouriness
Dill shares a blend with salt and msg, which is a different kind of fact from the combinations above. They supply a basic taste and essentially no aroma, so there is nothing for dill to harmonise with or clash against. The question worth asking is not whether they suit each other but how much and when — salt drawn in early behaves differently from salt added at the end, and a blend already carrying it needs none added separately.
If you have no dill
What to use instead, and — more usefully — where each replacement stops working.
Dill
AcceptableUse: ~0.33× by volume — About a third the volume, and less if the jar is more than a few months old.
Dried dill keeps the grassiness and loses the cooling lift, which is a bigger loss than the ratio suggests. Freeze-dried dill — bright green rather than khaki — keeps considerably more and is worth the difference. Frozen fresh dill beats both.
| Flavour | Aroma | Colour | Heat |
|---|---|---|---|
| partial | partial | partial | n/a |
Works for
- Dips, dressings and dairy-based sauces
- Bread doughs
- Potato salads
Does not work for
- Gravlax and cured fish, where fresh fronds are structural
- Scandinavian potato dishes where dill is used by the handful
- Any garnish
Fennel seed
PoorClose relatives with a superficially similar look and a genuinely different flavour. Fennel is dominated by anethole and tastes of anise; dill leaf is dominated by phellandrene and dill ether and tastes of neither. Fennel fronds, where you can get them, are the better version of this swap and are still not dill. The seed is a poor stand-in for the leaf of any plant, including its own.
| Flavour | Aroma | Colour | Heat |
|---|---|---|---|
| different | partial | different | n/a |
Works for
- Oily fish, where anise and dill both work for reasons of their own
- Emergencies in a cucumber salad
Does not work for
- Gravlax, dill pickles and anything Scandinavian, where the herb is the identity
- Potato and soured cream dishes
- Persian rice dishes
No ratio, because none is defensible. The two plants are related and the flavours are not, and a number here would suggest otherwise.
Preparation and use
Add it last. Dill has almost nothing that survives more than a minute or two of heat, so it goes in after the pan comes off — the one exception being anything enclosed, such as a fish baked in a parcel or a bread, where the volatiles cannot escape. Cut it with a sharp knife just before use rather than chopping ahead; blunt cutting bruises the fine fronds and they go grey. And use more than feels reasonable if you are cooking Scandinavian or Ukrainian food, where the herb is a component rather than an accent.
The defining herb of Scandinavian and eastern European cooking, used in quantity with fish, potatoes, cucumbers, soured cream and eggs. It is essential to gravlax and to dill pickles, and it goes through Persian rice dishes and herb stews, Greek and Turkish filo pies and stuffed vegetables, and yoghurt sauces across the eastern Mediterranean. It suits fat, acid and starch and does badly against strong spicing.
- boiling — Destroys it. Dill leaf added to a simmering pot is gone within a couple of minutes and leaves a vaguely grassy residue. It goes in at the end or after the heat is off.
- infusing — Steeping fresh fronds in warm cream, yoghurt or oil off the heat extracts the aroma cleanly and is the most reliable way to get dill into something warm.
- grinding — Chopping bruises the fine fronds and they oxidise quickly; dill is cut with a sharp knife shortly before use rather than prepared ahead.
- baking — Survives enclosure in a fish parcel or a bread dough better than it survives an open pan, because the volatiles cannot escape.
Convert dill between spoons and grams (a level teaspoon of leaf dill is about 1 ± 0.15 g)
Appears in: Khmeli suneli, Ranch seasoning, Svan salt, Adjika
Techniques that matter for it
- Salt-curing with spices — Gravlax, with salt and sugar.
Storage and freshness
| Form | Good for | Conditions | Fridge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leaf | 6–12 months (typically 9 months) | Cool, dark, dry and closed, in small quantities. | No |
Crush a pinch. If it smells only vaguely green with no cooling note, the dill ether has gone and what remains is a colouring agent. Dried dill is among the most commonly stale jars in a domestic cupboard because it is bought for one recipe and kept for years.
- Khaki rather than green
- No cooling note on crushing
- A hay smell
- Volatilisation of phellandrene and dill ether
- Fading from green to khaki
- Oxidation to a hay character
Quality is not the same as safety
Stale dried dill is a quality matter. Fresh dill spoils like any soft herb and slimy fronds should be discarded.
Forms
These forms differ enough to need separate answers: treating them as interchangeable produces a dish that is wrong.
Fresh dill
Feathery fronds, cut and added at the end. The principal form.
Grassy, cooling and immediately recognisable.
Cut with a sharp knife shortly before use, and add off the heat.
Not interchangeable with leaf
Dried dill retains the grassiness and loses the lift, and it is a reasonable seasoning in a dressing, a dip or a bread but not a substitute for fresh dill on gravlax or in a Scandinavian potato dish where the herb is the point. Freeze-dried dill is markedly closer to fresh than conventionally dried, and worth paying for.
Dried dill weed
Dried or freeze-dried fronds. Useful in dips, dressings and breads.
Grassy and flatter, with the cooling top note largely gone.
Rehydrate briefly in the liquid or fat of the dish before use where possible.
Not interchangeable with fresh
Around a third the volume of fresh, and even at that ratio it is a different and quieter herb.
Commonly confused with dill
Direct comparisons, each with the difference that actually changes what you cook.
Botany
Apiaceae
The carrot family — dill sits alongside fennel, coriander, cumin, caraway, celery and parsley.
The finely divided leaf. The seed of the same plant is profiled separately, because the two behave nothing alike in a kitchen.
An annual to about a metre, with hollow stems and finely divided blue-green feathery leaves, topped by the flat umbels characteristic of the carrot family. It bolts readily in heat, which is why dill leaf is a short-season crop and why it is frequently sown in succession.
Commonly confused with
The fruit of the same plant, and a separate ingredient rather than a concentrated version of the leaf. The seed is dominated by carvone and is sharp, warm and caraway-adjacent; the leaf is dominated by α-phellandrene and dill ether and is grassy and delicate. A pickle recipe calling for one and made with the other is a different pickle.
Close relatives, and fennel fronds look almost identical to dill leaf. Fennel tastes of anise and dill does not. Confusing the two at a market stall is easy and the results are obvious immediately.
Hemlock and other poisonous Apiaceae
The carrot family contains several of the most poisonous plants in Europe, and some of them have finely divided leaves. This matters for foraging rather than for shopping: identify wild Apiaceae with certainty or leave them alone.
How it is grown
The plant, how it is propagated and farmed, what threatens the crop, and where it is produced now. Crop diseases here are plant health, not food safety.
Another part of the same plant. Dill leaf and dill seed are one plant, Anethum graveolens, cut at different stages; the plant is described under dill seed. What follows describes that plant: Dill seed.
The leaf crop is cut before the plant flowers, about 40–50 days after sowing, where the seed crop stands until the fruits have formed. Dill for leaf is mostly a small-scale garden crop grown the world over, with field production in Scandinavia and Germany, while dill for seed is a field crop of India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Hungary and Egypt. Fresh leaf yields 3–20 t a hectare and dries to about a tenth of that weight.
The flattened dry fruit of the dill plant, which is also grown for its leaf.
From planting to first harvest: 5–6 months
An annual. Flowering starts two to three months after sowing and ripe seed is harvested at five to six months, though the handbook warns that climate, cultivar, nutrients and water make these times vary widely. Each plant flowers and fruits over a long period. The oil in the fresh herb rises as the plant develops, peaks when the fruits are young, and declines until the seed is mature.
How it is propagated
- Seed.
Easily raised from seed sown where the crop is to stand, in early spring in temperate climates or towards the end of summer where summers are very hot. The seed stays viable for two to three years without special storage, and about three-quarters of it germinates.
The flowers are strongly protandrous, shedding their pollen before the stigmas develop, so cross-pollination appears to be normal. They are well visited by bees and flies.
Growing conditions
- Temperature · 16–18 °C
Primarily a summer crop of temperate climates, thriving at monthly average temperatures of 16–18 °C in full light; growth stops below about 7 °C, and the plant tolerates neither frost nor wet conditions.
- Rainfall · 500–1700 mm/year
The annual water requirement, from rain or irrigation, is given as 500–1700 mm.
- Altitude · 0–2000 m
In the tropics it can be grown successfully up to about 2000 m.
- Soil pH · 6–7 pH
It prefers a sandy loam at pH 5.6–6.5.
- Light and shade
Dill in full sun produces significantly more leaf and a higher yield of herb than plants given only 30–70 per cent of natural light. Its flower buds develop faster, and the concentration of oil is almost six times higher.
- Day length
Generally treated as a long-day plant for flowering, with a critical day length of 11–14 hours, though some reports suggest it is day-neutral and that long days merely hasten flowering.
How it is farmed
- Intensive field crop · India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Hungary and Egypt
Worldwide, dill is grown chiefly for its fruit, and these were the largest producers in the late 1990s. A seed crop is given windbreaks against lodging and a four-year rotation.
- Home gardens
Dill for leaf is mostly grown on a small scale in gardens all over the world, with larger field production in Scandinavia and Germany. As a garden crop it is mostly intercropped, between onions, parsley or carrots for example.
Most spices are grown in more than one way; none of these is the only one.
Harvest
Harvested by hand or by machine, depending on the farm.
Fruits are harvested when fully developed but still green, seven to nine days after the petals fall, when their oil content is 2.6–3.7 per cent. Left until they turn dark grey some two weeks later, the oil falls to about 1.7 per cent and the fruits shed heavily. Leaf is cut before flowering, about 40–50 days after sowing.
The window for cutting dill for herb oil — just after flowering, as the seed starts to ripen — is so short that sowings are staggered to spread it.
Seed yields range from 0.7 to 1.2 t a hectare and fresh herb from 3 to 20 t, the herb drying to about a tenth of its fresh weight. The handbook names the United States as the largest user of the fruit, at about 600 t a year, ahead of Japan at 50 t and Germany at 30 t. It advised against expanding production, because so small a market is easily glutted and prices then fall very low, and expected dill to remain chiefly a home-garden herb.
Pests and diseases of the crop
Wet-weather rots of dill
OtherFusarium culmorum, Pythium sp. and Rhizoctonia sp. · Whole plant · Temperate climates
Prolonged wet weather in temperate climates encourages these organisms, which can destroy the crop.
How growers manage it:The handbook says control is not possible. The one measure it offers is to grow a crop the wind can dry easily: not too dense, and sparingly supplied with nitrogen.
Fungal attack of dill in flower
Fungal diseaseBotrytis sp. and Alternaria sp. · Flowering umbels
Wet weather while the crop is in flower can bring attack by these fungi, which prevents the fruit from setting.
Seed chalcid of cumin and dill
Insect pestSystole albipennis · Fruits
The larvae of this chalcid fly eat the fruits of cumin, where the handbook counts it among the major pests, and may infest the fruits of dill.
Where it comes from and how it is made
The eastern Mediterranean and western Asia.
- India — major producer. A major producer of the plant, principally for seed.
- Egypt — major producer. A principal supplier of the dried leaf.
- Russia — notable producer
- United States — notable producer. Grown in the Pacific Northwest for the pickling trade.
Leaf cut young, before flowering. Once the plant bolts the leaf coarsens and the crop becomes a seed crop.
- Cutting — Young leafy growth cut before flowering.
- Drying or freeze-drying — Air-dried at low temperature, or increasingly freeze-dried.Why: Dill leaf is among the most fragile of the dried herbs and freeze-drying preserves noticeably more of it, which is why the two products differ so visibly in colour.
- Sieving — Dried leaf separated from stem fragments.
Graded on colour, leaf-to-stem ratio and volatile oil. Colour is the practical indicator of drying method.
Not a common adulteration target. The usual quality failure is excess stem and over-hot drying.
An annual, sown in succession for a continuous leaf supply because each sowing bolts within weeks in warm weather.
Temperate, with cool conditions favouring leaf and warm conditions pushing the plant into flower. A grower who wants leaf and a grower who wants seed want different weather.
How these steps work: freeze drying.
What processing and storage do to it, as measured
Drying · Depends on conditions α-phellandrene, dill ether, dillapiole, β-pinene, γ-terpinene, volatile oil
How drying changed dill herb oil depended on the genotype. Shade drying gave the highest α-phellandrene, 57.49 and 55.51 per cent of the oil in two genotypes, and was the better treatment for most components in two others; oven drying at 40 °C gave the highest oil yield, 1.86 per cent, in one genotype, and the most dill ether in another. Drying at 60 °C lowered the oil content of sensitive genotypes while raising dillapiole in some.
Conditions: in air · Shade drying, or a forced-air oven at 40 or 60 °C · Leaves and flowers of six Iranian genotypes grown in one field, harvested at full bloom and dried to 10–12 per cent moisture before distillation
What this does not show: One season, one field and three drying treatments, analysed as a biplot, so not every treatment mean is given in the text. The components analysed did not include limonene or carvone, which lead some dill weed oils, and no sensory test was made.
Measured on the spice
Buying and quality
Buy fresh dill and freeze what you cannot use. This is one of the few herbs where a home freezer genuinely outperforms drying: chopped fronds frozen in a little oil or water keep the cooling note that conventional drying destroys. Keep a small jar of freeze-dried dill for dips and dressings, and do not expect it to do the work of the fresh herb on cured fish or new potatoes.
- For dried: green rather than khaki, which usually means freeze-dried.
- A cooling note as well as a grassy one on crushing.
- For fresh: perky fronds rather than limp ones, and no yellowing at the base.
- A small jar — dried dill fades fast and is used infrequently.
Graded on colour, leaf-to-stem ratio and volatile oil. As with basil, colour is the useful proxy for drying method, and drying method is most of what separates a usable dried dill from a decorative one.
History and trade
Dill is documented in Egyptian, Greek and Roman use and appears in the Gospels among the tithed herbs. Its enduring association with preservation — dill pickles, cured fish — is old and practical: the plant flowers at the same time cucumbers crop, and the umbels and leaf went into the brine together because both were to hand.
A modest trade, with India dominating seed production and Egypt supplying much of the dried leaf. Fresh dill is grown close to its markets.
In the wider history of spices
Old Babylonian, no later than about 1730 BC · Babylonia
The oldest known recipes, on tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection
The oldest known culinary recipes are on clay tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection. Three date to the Old Babylonian period, no later than about 1730 BC; a fourth is more than a thousand years younger. One gives twenty-five stews and broths in brief, four of them largely vegetarian; the other two give fewer dishes in more detail. The scholars who translated and cooked from them describe meat stews made with sheep fat and flavoured with leek, garlic, onion and coriander. One simple stew comes out, they say, with a mild taste of cilantro and onion. Their worked version of the beet stew tuh’u uses cumin, fresh coriander, Persian shallot, leek and garlic and is finished with crushed coriander seed. A broth named as Elamite is the only recipe on any of the tablets to use dill. They see in the stews an early stage of a tradition still dominant in Iraqi cooking.
Contemporary text
Cumin, Coriander seed, Coriander leaf, Garlic, Onion
Contested: The plant names are less certain than a recipe makes them look. The authors warn that many identifications of herbs proposed by modern scholars rest mainly on medical compendia, and that some plants so identified taste extremely bitter or pungent in food. The recipes rarely give quantities, all three old tablets are damaged, and the cooked versions are the authors’ experiments. Read as an excerpt from their chapter, not in the edition of the tablets.
c. 77 CE · Roman world
Pliny on the seasoning plants of the Roman kitchen garden
In the book of his Natural History on garden plants, Pliny goes through the kitchen’s seasonings one by one. Mint scents the dishes at country entertainments. Cumin is “the best suited of all the seasoning herbs” to delicate stomachs, the most esteemed in his part of the world being that of Carpetania, though elsewhere that of Africa and Ethiopia is preferred. Caraway, an exotic named for Caria, is used chiefly in cooking; lovage, native to Liguria, is by his day grown everywhere; savory is reckoned among the seasoning plants and rivals wild marjoram. Gith is used by bakers, and dill and anise by cooks and physicians; country people sprinkle poppy seed on the upper crust of bread and season the under crust with parsley and gith. Coriander, anise and mustard are sown at the autumn equinox, and the best mustard seed comes from Egypt. He gives sowing times for rue and parsley, and in the following book says that fennel is found in all parts of the world.
Contemporary text · Pliny the Elder
Mint, Cumin, Caraway, Lovage, Savory, Nigella, Aniseed, Poppy seed, Parsley, Coriander seed, Mustard seed, Rue, Fennel seed
Contested: Read in a nineteenth-century English translation whose plant names are the translators’ and were not checked against the Latin; “parsley” and “gith”, the black seed taken here as nigella, are their renderings. Pliny compiles from earlier writers as well as from what he knew. The chapters read do not date the work, and the date given is the one this catalogue already records for it.
Last decade of the eighth century · Frankish kingdom, Annappes, northern France
The Capitulare de villis lists the plants a royal estate should grow
The Capitulare de villis, an ordinance on the management of royal estates made in the reign of Charlemagne, ends with a list of the plants an estate garden should hold: seventy-four garden plants and sixteen fruit trees. The original is believed to date from the last decade of the eighth century and survives in a single copy made a few decades later. Among the plants are sage, rue, rosemary, parsley, lovage, dill, fennel, mint, savory, coriander, chervil, caraway, cumin, black cumin, fenugreek, garlic and onion, and bay among the trees. Bound with it are inventories of two royal estates, Asnapium, generally identified as Annappes in northern France, and Treola, recording what was found in their gardens; these include sage, mint, lovage, savory, coriander, garlic and onion, and correspond closely to the ordinance’s list.
Contemporary text · Charlemagne
Sage, Rue, Rosemary, Parsley, Lovage, Fennel seed, Mint, Savory, Coriander seed, Chervil, Caraway, Cumin, Nigella, Fenugreek, Garlic, Onion, Bay leaf
Contested: The authors caution against reading the list as a record of what grew. Most of it can be found in an older Latin version of a Hippocratic text, and they think it more realistic to see such lists as the learned elite’s attempt to describe Carolingian agriculture through classical knowledge than as a true picture; the two estate inventories they regard as reliable. The Latin names do not always fix a single plant.
Dedicated to Gozbert, abbot of St Gall 816–837 · St Gall, Switzerland, Reichenau, Lake Constance
The Plan of St Gall gives each herb its own bed
The Plan of St Gall, five sheets of parchment sewn together and dedicated to Gozbert, abbot of St Gall between 816 and 837, sets out a Benedictine monastery with three plots for plants. The small herb or medicinal garden, about 11 by 8 metres, has sixteen beds, each for one plant. Twelve hold herbs: savory, costmary, fenugreek, rosemary, sage, rue, cumin, lovage, fennel and three kinds of mint, all of them, in the words of a modern study, usable for decoration, seasoning and medicine. The vegetable garden of eighteen beds has garlic, shallots, leeks and onions, and herbs apparently not counted as medicinal: parsley, chervil, dill, black cumin, savory, celery leaf and coriander. Bay is among the trees of the orchard, which is also the cemetery.
Contemporary text · Gozbert, abbot of St Gall
Savory, Fenugreek, Rosemary, Sage, Rue, Cumin, Lovage, Fennel seed, Mint, Parsley, Chervil, Nigella, Coriander seed, Garlic, Onion, Bay leaf
Contested: The plan is of an ideal monastery, not a survey of a real one: the study says the buildings were in all likelihood never built to it and that it was meant as a model for new foundations. It shows what a ninth-century monastic garden was expected to hold. A caption in the same study dates the plan to about 825–850.
Culture
Recorded by tradition rather than merged into one narrative — these are genuinely different practices.
Scandinavia
Dill is the defining herb of Nordic cooking and is used with a generosity that has no equivalent further south: whole bunches with new potatoes, packed onto gravlax with sugar and salt, through crayfish boils, into cream sauces for fish. Swedish cooking treats dill less as a seasoning than as a vegetable.
- Gravlax
- New potatoes with dill
- Crayfish boils
- Cream sauces for fish
Russia, Ukraine and eastern Europe
Dill goes on almost everything: soups, potatoes, cucumbers, sour cream, fish, salads. Its ubiquity in Russian and Ukrainian cooking is proverbial to the point of being a joke among visitors, and it is one of the strongest regional herb identities in Europe.
- On soups and potatoes
- With soured cream
- In salted and fermented cucumbers
Iran and the Caucasus
Shevid goes into rice dishes — baghali polo, dill and broad bean rice, is a staple — and into herb stews. Persian cooking uses herbs in quantity as a structural component rather than as a garnish, and dill is one of the principal ones.
- Baghali polo
- Herb stews and kuku
Greece and Türkiye
Dill goes into stuffed vine leaves, into spanakopita and other filo pies, into bean and courgette dishes and into yoghurt sauces. It is used more sparingly than in Scandinavia and appears in a wider range of preparations.
- Dolma and stuffed vegetables
- Filo pies
- Bean and courgette dishes
A long record as a digestive and calming herb across Europe and the Near East, and the origin of gripe water — the name descends from a Norse word meaning to lull. Recorded as tradition; SpiceHQ makes no health claim on that basis.
What it is called
- Swedish: dill
- Russian: укроп (ukrop)
- Persian: شوید (shevid)
- Greek: άνηθος (ánithos)
What we do not know
Published openly. A gap we have named is more useful than a gap we have filled with plausible prose.
Not yet established for dill:
- Archaeological evidence
- Historical timeline
- Ceremonial use
- Regulatory limits