Fennel

Fennel, Foeniculum vulgare, is a tall aromatic plant of the carrot family with a sweet anise scent, cultivated for its seed, leaf and swollen leaf-base. Its classical associations are unusually rich. The giant fennel, Ferula, a related plant with a pithy stalk that smoulders slowly, is the reed in which the Titan Prometheus is said to have carried stolen fire down from heaven to humankind; and the plain of Marathon, where the Athenians won their famous victory, takes its name from the Greek marathon, fennel, for the plant that grew there.

In colonial New England fennel and dill seeds together were nicknamed meetin' seeds, carried to Sunday service and chewed through the long Puritan sermon to still hunger and drowsiness without visibly eating, a small and specific piece of American religious social history distinct from the herb's older Mediterranean uses. Wild fennel, finocchio selvatico, remains a defining flavour of Sicilian and southern Italian cooking, used well beyond the cultivated bulb vegetable that shares the name, a reminder that several quite different plants and plant parts, leaf, seed, pollen and swollen stem, all travel under the single word fennel.

Fennel is also one of the three core botanicals, alongside wormwood and anise, that define absinthe, the notorious green spirit of nineteenth-century France, a modern drink resting on exactly the same aromatic seed prized by Puritan New England for entirely different, sober reasons.

Culpeper placed fennel under Mercury, and it was among the plants long reputed to sharpen the sight and clear the head, a folk reputation recorded here as history, not as medical claim. In European folk practice fennel was a protective and strengthening herb, stuffed in keyholes to keep out ghosts on Midsummer Eve and hung over doors, and it was one of the nine sacred herbs of the Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm against poison and infection. Its seeds were chewed to quiet hunger during long church services and fasts, giving it a homely place in Christian as well as pagan folk custom.

Pliny records the belief that a snake, on sloughing its old skin, would rub against fennel and eat it to sharpen its sight, the origin of the plant's long reputation as a herb for clear vision, an idea repeated by herbalists for over a thousand years afterward and given here as recorded folklore, not as any claim that fennel restores eyesight. The same association made fennel a common ingredient of eye-washes in medieval and early modern medicine, a domestic practice with no basis confirmed by modern ophthalmology, though the plant's genuine value as a flavouring and digestive herb was never in question.