Fennel
Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) is a flowering perennial herb, and its seeds provide a popular spice. It grows up to 2.5m tall and has distinctive yellow flowers and feathery leaves.
Fennel is a native of the Mediterranean but has spread to many areas. The fruits are oval, pale green to yellowish brown, ridged and about 4–8mm long. The main varieties are sweet fennel (F. vulgare var. dulce), also known as French or Roman fennel; and bitter fennel (F. vulgare var. Mill). Bitter fennel is the original wild form, with a somewhat bitter-tasting fruit, and this was probably the only type used in the classical world. Sweet fennel appears to have originated in Italy before spreading eastward to India and China.154 Charlemagne’s eighth-century edict (the Capitulare de villis) refers to it in a long list of herbs, plants, vegetables and trees intended for the garden. Florence (Italian-type) sweet fennel or Finocchio is the popular vegetable with bulbous hypocotyl.Fennel appeared in a list of herbs and spices from second-millennium BCE Nuzi, Mesopotamia.155
Fennel has lent its name to the site of the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE), where the vastly outnumbered Greeks defeated the Persian invaders, i.e. ‘marathon’ meant fennel in ancient Greek and so the battle is assumed to have taken place on a field of fennel.
Fennel was the marathron of Dioscorides – its medicinal properties when eaten as a herb or with the seed in a decoction of barley assisted lactation, while a drink from decoction of the leaves was good for kidney pains and bladder disorders.156 The juice from bruised stems and leaves was good for eye disorders affecting vision. It was also effective against snake bites (if taken with wine, assuming that you had a bottle of wine to hand in the wilderness), and the crushed roots mixed with honey and applied as a plaster were a good treatment for dog bites.
Pliny noted that when snakes shed their skins they rub themselves on the stalks and sharpen their sight with the juice of the plant, and therefore it was concluded that the juice would be beneficial for human sight also.157 He continued:The seed of the cultivated fennel is medicinally employed in wine, for the stings of scorpions and serpents, and the juice of it, injected into the ears, has the effect of destroying small worms that breed there. Fennel is employed as an ingredient in nearly all our seasonings, vinegar sauces more particularly: it is placed also beneath the undercrust of bread. The seed … is highly esteemed, also, for affections of the lungs and liver. Taken in moderate quantities, it arrests looseness of the bowels, and acts as a diuretic; a decoction of it is good for gripings of the stomach, and taken in drink, it restores the milk. The root, taken in a ptisan, purges the kidneys – an effect which is equally produced by a decoction of the juice or of the seed; the root is good too, boiled in wine, for dropsy and convulsions. The leaves are applied to burning tumours, with vinegar, expel calculi of the bladder, and act as an aphrodisiac.158
In addition, it promoted the secretion of seminal fluids when taken as a drink and was extremely beneficial to the generative organs, either as a decoction of the root in wine used as a poultice or used beaten up in oil. It was applied with wax to tumours and bruises, and the root, with wine for the stings of multipedes.
Pliny also described the many uses of a wild, larger variety of fennel (or Hippomarathron) which was regarded as more efficacious in every respect than cultivated fennel.
Fennel seeds were found along with others at the Roman town of Mons Claudianus in Egypt, and also at Mons Porphyrites among seven members of the Apiaceae family.159 Both sites are situated in the Eastern Desert. A small number of fennel seeds were found at the Cardo V sewer at Herculaneum.
Apicius stressed the enormous importance of laser/silphium to the Romans – it’s a kind of giant fennel – but fennel itself appears much less frequently in his recipes. It was an ingredient in barley soup, boiled beans or chickpeas with broth, wine, eggs and fresh fennel, in a white sauce for appetisers, in a sauce for broiled mullet, ground fennel seed in a seasoning for roast tenderloins, fennel seed in pottage with brains, in peas or beans à la vitellius (with herbs, spices and wine), in sauces for boiled meats, wild boar, venison and veal.
Fennel was certainly used by the Saxons – an old charm to improve low-yielding land, or if sorcery or witchcraft was suspected, included the use of fennel. It is known from late Saxon sites in Winchester and is shown in the physic garden of the St Gall monastery plan (820–830 CE). Wolf Storl documented further examples of the use of fennel to protect against devils, demons and evil spirits, which appears to have been quite widely adopted across medieval Europe.160
A 2016 study noted ten records of fennel in medieval cesspit deposits from the north of England (Beverly, Chester, Hull and York), one from the eleventh century, the remainder from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, which suggests a largely post-Norman adoption of the herb.161 The same study reviewed 217 recipes from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries; generally, the Apiaceae are not well represented in these historic records. Combined, caraway, coriander, cumin, dill and fennel were only present in around 1 per cent of recipes. It appears that fennel was only used as an occasional flavouring.
Two recipes for Cold Brewet appear in the 1390 Forme of Cury; one is later repeated in the fifteenth-century manuscript Harley 5401.162 It was a sauce made from cream of almonds spiced with salt, sugar, ginger, fennel juice and wine. Other recipes using fennel in The Forme of Cury are the wonderfully named Eowtes of Flessh, Salat, Fenkel in Soppes, Compost and Erbolates.
Compost, in this case, was a highly spiced dish of stewed pickled vegetables and included fennel seed. A contemporary Italian source used fennel flowers in a fennel sauce.163Fennel roots are used in a recipe from 1615 called ‘To boyle a capon another way’, but it was clearly still not very popular in the English kitchen at this time.164
Gerard’s Herball (1597) differentiates between common fennel and sweet fennel:
The second kind of Fennell is likewise well knowne by the name of sweete Fennell, so called because the seedes thereof are in taste sweete like unto Annise seedes, resembling the common Fennell, saving that the leaves are larger and fatter, or more oileous: the seede greater and whiter, and the whole plant in each respect greater.
The medicinal uses were varied: powdered seed preserved the eyesight; the green leaves eaten or seed made into a beverage and drunk would ‘filleth womens brests with milke’; a decoction of fennel when drunk would ease the pain of kidneys, avoid stones and promote urine; roots when boiled in wine and drunk would serve as already mentioned and also guard against dropsy; seeds when drunk would alleviate stomach pain and the desire to vomit and break wind; the herb, seeds and root were all good for lungs, liver and kidneys.
Fennel appears as an ingredient in various cordial waters and health-giving syrups in John Murrell’s 1617 book.165
Medicinal uses of fennel also appear in Elizabeth Grey’s 1653 medical text: fennel juice or steeped in water and wine with other herbs as remedies for eye problems; fennel root in a broth for the weak, and in a medicine to purge and amend the internal organs; young leaves in a syrup to open the liver; and green fennel in a plaster for the head. Fennel seeds were used in numerous recipes: in a ‘sovereign water’ as a panacea for many conditions; in a drink for ‘all kinds of surfets’; in a drink against melancholy and another to promote urine; in two remedies for ‘Aqua Composita’; in a powder for sore eyes; in Dr Stephen’s Water (a common remedy of the time); in a powder against wind; in an ointment for the spleen; in a remedy for kidney stones and in another one for purging.166 Oil of fennel was made by placing a quantity between two tiles or iron plates, heating them and pressing out the liquor, which was then a good treatment for tissick (a lung complaint), dry scab, burning and scalding.
Various late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English cookery books contain recipes using fennel. Young sprouts of fennel are used in a recipe for ‘Sallet de Sante’, branches of fennel to make white fennel and red fennel syrups, fennel seeds in ‘Fennel in Dragee’ and green fennel in a seasoned beef broth with venison.167 Fennel seeds and roots are used in another recipe for Dr Stephen’s Water, leaves and roots in a recipe for syrup of vinegar, and fennel tops in one to pickle cucumbers.168 In The Whole Duty of a Woman (1696), as well as use in some homespun remedies, fennel is used in a recipe to souse fish and as garnishes for roast salmon and for turkey.169 Hannah Glasse seems to have made modest use of fennel – it appears in a recipe to dress mackerel, the seeds in a recipe to make black cherry water, the flowers in a recipe for plague water (in a distillation of a huge number of other roots, flowers and seeds), the seeds in one for ‘surfeit water’ (a remedy for overindulgence), fennel flowers in one to make milk water, and one for pickled fennel.170
In Europe and North America today, fennel is generally grown for the bulb to be used as a vegetable, but in Asia and the Middle East it is largely grown for the seed. It is cultivated on a large scale in Italy, France, Romania, Russia, Germany, India, Argentina and the USA, as well as in many other countries.