Alexanders
Alexanders is a herb related to parsley, also known as horse parsley, but is in fact a different genus, with the Latin name Smyrnium olusatrum. It is native to the Mediterranean region, and can reach heights of 1.5m.
It produces umbels of tiny yellow-green flowers. It is considered intermediate in flavour between parsley and celery, but with a somewhat bitter aftertaste. It’s common in coastal areas and I encountered it along the north Suffolk coast one early April, where it dominated the hedgerows of every field, roadside verge and coastal path, and was widespread for 10 miles or so inland.Alexanders was known to the ancient Greeks – Theophrastus commenting on its large stalks, thick root and black seeds.5 It was thought useful to treat those suffering from strangury and stone (being administered in sweet white wine). Pliny also described it under ‘Olusatrum’.6 Both men commented that the juice or gum had the flavour of myrrh, and the genus name is derived from the ancient Greek word for myrrh, smyrna. Pliny observed that:
Olusatrum … is particularly repulsive to scorpions. The seed of it, taken in drink, is a cure for gripings in the stomach and intestinal complaints, and a decoction of the seed, drunk in honied wine, is curative in cases of dysuria. The root of the plant, boiled in wine, expels calculi of the bladder, and is a cure for lumbago and pains in the sides. Taken in drink and applied topically, it is a cure for the bite of a mad dog, and the juice of it, when drunk, is warming for persons benumbed with cold.7
Dioscorides also appeared to describe alexanders using the term Hipposelinon, which was different to his Smyrnium – a source of confusion for later botanists.8
Alexanders may have been introduced to Britain by the Romans, but there is presently no firm archaeobotanical evidence for that.
There is a lengthy description of alexanders in John Gerard’s 1597 Herball:
the seede is thicke, long, blacke, something bitter, and of an aromaticall or spicie smell: the roote is thicke, blacke without, white within, like to a litle Radish, & is good to be eaten, out of which being broken or cut, there issueth foorth a juice that quickly waxeth thicke, having in it a sharpe bitternesse, like in taste unto Myrhhe …9
Various late sixteenth- to seventeenth-century recipes featured alexanders; there is a recipe under ‘sallets for fish daies’: ‘Alexander buds cut long waies, garnished with welkes’.10 Alexanders appears with many other herbs in a recipe called Divers Sallets Boyled and in the 1638 Two Books of Cookerie and Carving.11
A remedy for bladder stones appeared in The English Huswife: roots of alexanders, parsley, pellitory and hollyhock were steeped in white wine or chicken broth, strained, then ground sloe kernels were added, and it was then taken as a drink.12 Chopped alexanders mixed with oatmeal, boiled in milk and then added to beer was used as a topical treatment for the ague. Alexanders, together with other herbs, was used in a remedy for the heart, stomach, spleen, liver, lungs and brain.13
In 1660, alexanders appeared in a recipe ‘to make a Bisk the best way’; it involves a wide variety of meats boiled in water and stewed in gravy, other meats, herbs and sausages fried in butter, with fried spinach or alexander leaves, eggs, gravy, chestnuts and many other ingredients, all served up ultimately as a thick rich stew, similar to pottage.14 Also in this book ‘ellicksander buds’ appear in several salad recipes, including one named ‘A grand sallet of Ellicksander-buds’:
Take large ellicksander-buds and boil them in fair water after they be cleansed and washed, but first let the water boil, then put them in, and being boild, drain them … then have boild capers and currans and lay them in the midst of a clean scowred dish, the buds parted in two with a sharp knife, and laid round about upright, or one half on one side, and the other against it on the other side, so also carved lemon, scrape on sugar, and serve it with good oyle and wine vinegar.
Alexanders was also employed as a garnish for salmon boiled in wine and water, together with other herbs and berries, in a recipe for fried snails and in one for fried and buttered ‘gourds, pumpions, cowcumbers or muskmillions’.
It is the key ingredient in Ellicksander Pottage:Chop ellicksanders and oatmeal together, being picked and washed, then set on a pipkin with fair water, and when it boils put in your herbs, oatmeal and salt, boil it on a soft fire and make it not too thick, being almost boild put in some butter.
Fried alexanders was also featured as a garnish in a 1674 recipe for fried conger and another for fried salmon and one for pickled alexander buds.15 A recipe for pickled alexander buds (with vinegar, salt and a little stale beer) was also included in a 1661 book, together with one using young alexander leaves in a Spring Pottage and another using buds in ‘a Grand Sallet for the Spring’.16 Young leaves were employed in ‘an excellent potage to cleanse the blood’. Parsley, alexanders and sage leaves fried in butter were used as a garnish on a 1677 fried salmon recipe.17
The roots of parsley, alexanders, fennel and mallows, together with seeds of parsley, nettles, fennel, caraway, anise and grumel (gromwell), and a handful each of pellitory of the wall, saxifrage, betony, parsley and groundsel were used in a recipe from the same year for ‘a metheglin [a flavoured mead] for the collick and stone’; nutmegs, cinnamon, ginger and cloves were also added to what must have been an exotic-tasting drink.18
Parsley of Macedonia (another term for alexanders) appears as one of many ingredients in Syrup of Radish (which ‘expelleth Gravel and Stone, and scoureth the Kidneys’) from the 1690 The Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities.19 It has to be said that this particular book has such obscure and outrageous remedies that they seem to verge on witchcraft rather than herbal or traditional medicine, though syrup of radish seems perfectly innocuous.
As celery rose in popularity in the eighteenth century, so alexanders declined and is now quite rarely used as a culinary herb.