Foraging for Flavor Greek Herbs/Bean Cuisine / Spa ... - Kerasma

Both women represent twin
threads in Greek botanical lore:
herbs as essential seasonings for
food and as natural aids to health.
From earliest times, Greeks had an
intimate relationship with their
plants, gathering them from fields
and mountains, devising uses for
them over millennia of trial and
error. Herbs even played a part in
rituals.
Some, like thyme and rosemary,
were burnt as incense--the former
to instill courage in warriors before
battle, the latter to banish evil spirits.
Sweet yet pungent oregano
branches found their way into both
wedding garlands and wreaths on
tombs. Thought to have been created
by Aphrodite as a symbol of
happiness, the very word means
jewel of the mountains (ori =
mountains, ganos = jewel).
Marjoram, its milder cousin, was
also woven into wedding crowns
and funeral wreaths to bring peace
and contentment in this life and
the next.
Other herbs originated in myth,
usually as nymphs attempting to
escape a god's attention or a goddess's
wrath. Mint (Menthe), for
example, was a comely favorite of
Pluto. His ardor inflamed
Persephone's jealousy. Long since
accustomed to spending half the
year in Hades, the queen of the
underworld started to kick and
trample the unfortunate lass, but
Pluto intervened. He transformed
her into a fragrant, resiliant shrub
that would remind him of her presence
every time he touched her
leaves.
12 GREEKGOURMETRAVELER
The laurel or bay tree came into
being when Apollo pursued the
lovely but chaste nymph, Daphne.
Rather than submit to him, she
turned—with some help from her
mother, Gaea—into a tree with
strongly aromatic leaves. Although
thwarted, Apollo made the tree
(daphne in Greek) his symbol. He
wore a pliant branch as a crown to
herald his victory over the giant
serpent Python on Mt. Parnassos.
Later, the winners at the Pythian
Games at Delphi were also
crowned with laurel wreaths, while
the priestess there apparently
chewed bay leaves before muttering
her ambiguous prophecies. Its
connotations of merit and distinction
have come down to us in
terms like Nobel Laureate or “to
rest on one's laurels.”