A Short History of the Herbs in Your Kitchen Drawer

Open the average spice drawer and you are, without quite realising it, looking at a museum. The little jars of rosemary, thyme, sage and mint seem ordinary to the point of dull. Each one of them, though, carries thousands of years of human history inside it, of medicine and ritual and love and survival. We simply stopped telling the stories that used to come with them.

Rosemary, for remembrance

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance, Shakespeare has the grieving Ophelia say, and he was not inventing the association out of thin air. Rosemary had been tied to memory for centuries before he ever wrote the line. Greek students are said to have woven it through their hair while studying for examinations. It was burned in sickrooms, tucked into wedding bouquets, and laid with the dead, a single plant pressed into service at very nearly every threshold of a human life. The curious twist is that modern researchers have taken a genuine interest in rosemary's effect on alertness and memory. The ancients could not have explained the chemistry. They noticed the effect anyway, and built a thousand-year tradition on top of it.

Sage, the cleanser

The name gives away almost everything. Sage shares a root with salvation and with salve, the Latin salvia, meaning to heal or to save. For most of recorded history it was among the most prized medicinal plants in the cabinet, reached for in matters ranging from a sore throat to a heavy grief. The practice of burning aromatic herbs to cleanse a space turns up in culture after culture right across the world, a near-universal human instinct to clear the air, in both the literal and the emotional sense of that phrase.

Thyme, for courage

Thyme carried a long reputation for bravery. Roman soldiers were said to bathe in it before battle, and medieval women embroidered little sprigs of it onto the scarves they gave to departing knights. It was also a genuinely effective antiseptic, used to dress wounds and to hold off decay long before anyone had isolated the compound that makes it work. Courage and protection, as it turns out, were partly a matter of chemistry all along.

Mint, the everyday remedy

Mint is so common that we forget it was ever considered special. And yet it appears in some of the oldest medical texts that survive, prescribed for digestion, for headaches, and for the general settling of an unhappy stomach. The Greeks gave it a myth and named it after a nymph. Households across the ancient world kept it close for precisely the reason you might reach for a peppermint tea after a heavy meal, because it works, and because people have known it works for a very, very long time.

Why the stories faded

So how did these storied plants dwindle into the forgettable jars at the back of the drawer? Largely because we industrialised both medicine and cooking. The active compounds were extracted, studied, and sold in tidy standardised doses, and the older whole-plant traditions came to seem quaint by comparison. The herb stayed on the shelf, and the meaning quietly drained out of it. That is a real loss, because the meaning was part of the medicine. The slow act of brewing a tea on purpose, of choosing a particular herb for a particular reason, of connecting a plant to a feeling, does something for the nervous system that a pill in a foil blister never will.

Looking at your drawer again

You do not need to become a herbalist to hold any of this differently. The next time you reach for the rosemary, you might remember that you are handling something human beings have trusted for thousands of years to sharpen the mind, the sage we have burned across the world to begin again, the thyme that quite literally went to war. Your kitchen drawer is full of small green inheritances, and they have been sitting there patiently on the shelf, waiting for someone to remember what they were for.