Sweet cicely is a plant I enjoy for many reasons. It is one of the first herbs to poke through the soil in winter, offering its sweet-tasting leaves for favourite recipes. These delicate, fern-like leaves give a heady anise scent to food and they look beautiful in a vase, too, particularly when the creamy, white flowers appear. When visitors to my herb cookery courses taste dozens of different fresh herbs, they often choose sweet cicely as their favourite. This herb reduces the acidity of sharp ingredients like rhubarb, gooseberries and damsons, meaning you can use far less sugar in cooking.
Sweet cicely is native to the mountains of southern and central Europe from the Pyrenees to the Caucasus. The Greek called this herb seseli and its taste caused it to become known as sweet cicely. In the 16th century, the herb expert John Gerard boiled the roots of the herb and gave the sieved potion to patients who were feeling generally off-colour. The herbalist Nicholas Culpeper believed the roots protected people against the plague. Sweet cicely was also grown around graves, possibly because of its anise aroma. And it was rubbed into wood panelling to provide shine and sweet smells.
COOKING
The subtle aniseed taste of the leaves and seeds means sweet cicely has a lot in common with chervil. It is good with shellfish or incorporated into creamy sauces for fish or chicken. I also add finely chopped leaves to fruit salads, apple and pear flans, mixed green salads and cucumber dishes. The flavour can give an unusual lift to mayonnaise, omelettes and risotto. And drinks like wine cups also benefit from the anise taste with honey overtones. The roots are edible too and like caraway, anise and fennel, they are used to flavour the spirit akvavit. I often use the frothy flowers to decorate food. When the flowers and the fern-like leaves are at their best, sweet cicely is definitely the prettiest plant in my herb garden.
Sweet cicely makes it possible to use less sugar when you are cooking sharp fruit. All you have to do is add whole leaves and stalks to the fruit and then remove them after cooking. Long cooking does reduce the anise aroma, so it is often a good idea to stir in more leaves, finely chopped this time, into the cooked fruit just before serving. When the flowers turn to seed, the flavour of the leaves is reduced. So to avoid having to choose between useful seeds or flavoursome leaves, I always cut half of my sweet cicely plants to the ground when they are in flower, so that new tasty leaves have formed when the rest of the plants have seeds. The green seeds are full of aniseed flavour for adding chopped to puddings like Tarte Tatin with Sweet Cicely Seeds (see page 231), for shortbread biscuits, cream cheese, omelettes and salads. They are also wonderful for anise-flavoured ice cream.
GROWING
This herb is easy to grow in all conditions. It is a hardy perennial which grows to 1m/39in tall. The creamy flower umbels grow from spring into early summer, when they turn into green edible seeds. Sweet cicely is said to prefer shade and damp soil, but my plants also thrive in full sun and the dry corners of the pudding bed in the herb garden.
I never seem to manage to remove all the seeds before they fall onto the ground. After the early stages, when the seeds are green, soft and full of flavour, they become tough, black and inedible. Then they fall off the plant, eventually producing seedlings which are difficult to remove from areas where I do not want them. This is because it is hard to dig up the very long roots. If you leave even a small portion of root in the ground, a new plant will develop. They are not suitable for growing in pots because of this large tap root.
Sow the seeds outside in the autumn, where you want plants to grow. They need several months at low temperatures to germinate. Or you can sow them in a seed tray, cover with glass, and put them in a very cold corner outside. The other way to encourage germination is to put seeds into a small container of sand and keep in the refrigerator for a month. You can also propagate the plant by taking root cuttings in spring or autumn.