Chervil

Chervil, Anthriscus cerefolium, is a delicate aromatic annual of the carrot family with a faint anise-and-parsley flavour, one of the fines herbes of French cookery. Its symbolism is quiet but distinct: because it is one of the first fresh green herbs of spring and because its taste and scent suggest renewal, chervil became associated with new life and resurrection, and it was traditionally eaten on Maundy Thursday in Holy Week, on the eve of Good Friday, as a herb pointing toward the resurrection of Easter.

Chervil is one of the four fines herbes of classical French cookery, alongside parsley, chives and tarragon, a defined culinary quartet used since at least the nineteenth century to finish delicate dishes, and it is always added at the very end of cooking or entirely raw, since its faint anise flavour is destroyed almost immediately by heat. Its cultivation in Europe is documented at least since Charlemagne's ninth-century estate ordinance, the Capitulare de villis, which names chervil among the herbs every royal garden was required to grow, the same list that also names dill, giving the herb a firmly attested place in European gardens for well over a thousand years before its later, more delicate culinary reputation took hold.

In the old herbals chervil was valued as a warming, cheering spring herb, its domestic uses given here as folk history. In the language of flowers it stood for sincerity, a meaning read from its plain, unshowy freshness. Its whole symbolic life turns on its season: a tender green that comes early, when little else is growing, it gathered to itself the meanings of spring itself, renewal, hope and the new life the Church set at Easter. A modest kitchen herb, chervil carries one clear and gentle idea, the return of green life after winter.

Chervil is markedly more delicate to grow than its fines-herbes companions, bolting to seed quickly in hot weather and doing best sown in partial shade or in the cool of early spring and autumn, a fussiness that has kept it rarer in gardens and shops than parsley despite centuries of cultivation. Its French name, cerfeuil, and the old English name gourmet's parsley both mark it as a herb valued by those who already knew their way around a kitchen garden rather than a plant everybody grew, a modest but genuine reputation for refinement that has stayed with it since the medieval monastery gardens first kept it going through the winter for the coming of spring.