Lovage

• Liebstöckel

  German

• lubczyk

  Polish

• libeček

  Czech

• leuștean

  Romanian

• levistico

  Italian

Powerfully savoury with a celery core, a faint bitterness and a lingering depth. It is one of very few herbs that adds what tastes like body rather than aroma, which is why it survives in soup traditions and disappeared from cuisines that stopped making soup.

Celery multiplied — intensely savoury, green and slightly musky, with a yeasty depth that is genuinely reminiscent of stock or of a bouillon cube. Rubbing a fresh leaf fills a room.

Fresh leaves are a glossy deep green; dried lovage is a dull olive.

Soft glossy leaves that wilt quickly. The stems are hollow, fibrous and firm, and are used as a straw or candied rather than eaten as a herb.

• 3-n-Butylphthalide and sedanolide — The compound family that defines celery, celery seed and lovage alike, and the source of the savoury depth. Lovage carries them at a much higher concentration than celery does, which is the whole difference between the two.(what 3-n-butylphthalide is)
• α-Terpinyl acetate — A sweet, slightly floral note that lifts the savoury base and distinguishes lovage from celery on close smelling.(what α-terpinyl acetate is)
• Ligustilide — A phthalide contributing much of the characteristic warm, slightly medicinal depth.

Use less than you think and put it in earlier than you would put in a herb. Lovage is several times stronger than celery leaf, which is the comparison most people reach for, and a whole handful in a soup will make it taste of nothing else. One or two leaves at the start of a stock is the right order of magnitude. Strip the leaf from the hollow stem — the stem is fibrous and contributes little — and treat what is left as an aromatic vegetable rather than as a garnish.

A soup and stock herb across central and eastern Europe: in broths, in potato and vegetable soups, in Romanian ciorbă, in stuffings and in stews. It behaves more like an aromatic vegetable than a finishing herb — added at the start and cooked for the duration — and it supplies a savoury body that few other plants do. The seed is used like celery seed, and the root is eaten as a vegetable.

• boiling — The characteristic use, and one where lovage behaves like a root vegetable rather than a herb: it goes in at the start of a soup or a stock and cooks for the duration, contributing body that a late-added herb could not.
• infusing — A single leaf in a stock gives a savoury depth out of all proportion to its size. It is one of the few herbs where a whole-leaf infusion is genuinely a technique.
• grinding — Lovage seed is used like celery seed — ground into a mixture or scattered whole on bread — and is more aromatic and less bitter than the leaf.
• frying — Chopped fine into fat at the start, where it functions like the celery in a soffritto and contributes more than the celery would.

Crush a pinch and look for the savoury depth rather than the green. Lovage loses its brightness first and keeps its stock-like quality much longer, so an old jar is diminished rather than useless — which is unusual among dried leaves and worth knowing.

• No savoury depth on crushing
• Brown rather than olive
• A generic hay smell

• Volatilisation of the terpene top notes
• Slower loss of the phthalide savoury fraction
• Fading from green to olive-brown

The real decision here is fresh against dried, and lovage is one of the few soft green herbs where dried is genuinely worth having: the savoury phthalides survive drying and only the bright green note is lost. If you can grow it, do — one plant supplies a household and returns every year — and if you cannot, a small jar of the dried leaf will do more for a pot of soup than most things on the shelf. Lovage seed is a separate purchase and behaves like celery seed.

• Grow it. Lovage is a hardy perennial that returns for a decade and is genuinely difficult to buy fresh outside central Europe.
• For dried: a savoury depth on crushing, not just a green smell.
• Leaf rather than the hollow stem, which is fibrous and contributes little.
• A small jar, since a little goes a very long way.

Apiaceae

A vigorous perennial reaching two metres or more, with glossy divided leaves resembling flat-leaf parsley or celery tops, hollow stems and flat umbels of yellow-green flowers. It is long-lived, hardy and startlingly large for a herb, which is one reason it left the modern kitchen garden.

Probably the eastern Mediterranean or western Asia, though the plant has been cultivated in Europe so long that its wild origin is not securely established.

• Poland — notable producer. One of the few countries where lovage remains an everyday kitchen herb.
• Germany — notable producer
• Romania — notable producer. Where leuștean is standard in ciorbă, the sour soups that are a national staple.
• Netherlands — notable producer

Leaf cut through the season and at its best before flowering; seed collected as the umbels ripen; root lifted in autumn from mature plants.

1. Cutting — Leafy growth cut before flowering.
2. Shade drying — Dried in shade or at low temperature.Why: The phthalides that carry the savoury character are relatively robust, so lovage survives drying better than most soft Apiaceae leaves.
3. Sieving — Dried leaf separated from the coarse hollow stem, which is fibrous.

A long-lived perennial, cut repeatedly through the season. It is grown at small scale for the herb trade and much more widely in domestic gardens across central and eastern Europe.

Temperate and cool, with adequate moisture. Lovage is genuinely hardy and dies back to the root each winter, returning larger each year.

Lovage was one of the standard herbs of European cooking for well over a thousand years — it appears in Roman sources, in the Carolingian capitulary listing plants to be grown on imperial estates, and in monastery gardens throughout the Middle Ages. Its retreat is recent and specific: it is a two-metre perennial, it tastes of stock, and both properties became liabilities in a twentieth century of small gardens and commercial bouillon.

A very small commercial trade. Lovage is grown for use rather than for sale across the countries that still eat it, and it is rarely stocked in British or American shops.

A long European medicinal record, chiefly as a diuretic and digestive, and the plant appears in medieval monastic garden lists in that capacity as much as a culinary one. Recorded as tradition; SpiceHQ makes no health claim.