Borage – A Vintage Herb Makes A Stylish Return
Modern Trends Revive Interest In This Versatile Plant
Aug 4, 2009
Glancing back: take Grüne Sosse, the cold green sauce served with roast beef and boiled potatoes that is a traditional specialty in Frankfurt, Germany. This variant of the sauce verte, salsa verde et al found in many cuisines includes roughly chopped hard-boiled eggs and fresh herbs: parsley, chives, chervil, sorrel, garden cress, pimpernel – and borage.
If borage the herb (i.e. the leaves very finely chopped) has long found favor in golden oldie recipes like Grüne Sosse, borage flowers have also been a big part of the plant's attraction, not least for bees, and beekeepers whose hives are near fields where borage is cultivated for oil produce borage honey. In kitchen gardens, borage has long been considered an excellent companion plant for tomatoes and strawberries (some swear they taste better when grown near borage) and there are many old recipes for preparing borage leaves, chopped or whole, as a vegetable.
Left Behind
Despite all this, over the past decades garden cultivation of borage has suffered a lag in popularity even in countries where the ancient plant has long been cherished for its many possibilities. Traditionally Middle Eastern and European, borage is found in North American and other gardens around the world but is not usually a presence in any form, including as a dried herb, in food stores. Many herb charts don’t include it, although it was a standard on charts even as little as 20 years ago.
Because however of the rising fashion for traditional plants (and natural remedies and beauty treatments, for which borage has myriad applications), and not least flower cuisine which uses edible flowers as ingredients, the tides are turning. People are re-discovering borage's many virtues and the appeal of growing it, which is easy to do, even in pots, because it's not fussy and just needs a lot of direct sunlight.
Borage As A Vegetable
Fresh young borage leaves can not only be cooked as greens, they can be stuffed with minced meat and rice, used chopped as a filling for ravioli, or deep-fried together with cheese in pastry parcels. And there are many more possibilities. A word to the wise: the leaves (like borage stems) have fine little hairs on them, which means that especially older leaves will need soaking before cooking. If chopped for use as vegetable or herb, chop fine so as to render the hairs invisible.
Floral And Herbal Use
Candied borage flowers are a traditional decoration for desserts, but to the contemporary mind the flowers look (and taste) better when natural. Some put fresh borage flowers in ice cubes. Dried, the deep blue, star-shaped blossoms make a funky tisane of an unusual purplish color.
Borage the herb often includes the flowers chopped in with the leaves - both have a refreshing, cucumber-y taste - and is used to make jelly, or sprinkled in teas hot and cold, cocktails, punches, and fruit drinks and on canapés, soups, vegetables and salads. Sometimes - particularly for contemporary summer salads - only the leaves are chopped, and the flowers are left whole. A single borage flower floating in a bowl of soup also makes for an eye-catching modern presentation.
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