Thyme and Love

This hardly counts as a post, I suppose, as it isn’t remotely a meal. It’s something more of a culinary love letter to my favorite cooking experience. There are a number of kitchen events I love. Once, for example, our fish monger delivered a whole crate of live Balmain bugs (an Australian slipper lobster typically delivered frozen or cooked) and my heart matched each erratic tail-flip from under their wet hessian sack. On another occasion, a fourteen-chef-strong, frenzied kitchen halted, silently, moments before lunch service to reverently share an over-sized omelet laced with the season’s first imported French chanterelle mushrooms. Then there was the spring when our butcher arrived, back door, one morning with a twinkle, a whole suckling pig and a lamb dangling from his two beefy hands.

There are so many more. Little moments of cooking joy; everyone pauses to observe a beautifully baked brioche; snapper arrive still stiff with rigor; a perfect dark chocolate soufflé elicits, as it rushes from oven to patron, gasps of pleasure from cooks and waiters alike.

My favorite culinary experience, which is so much more terribly mundane than any I’ve mentioned above, is the impetus behind this love letter. This is a sonnet to a scraggly herb with tiny, robust, blue-blushed leaves, filled with menthol-pine aromatics. My go-to flavor-enhancer, always lurking somewhere in my crisper, complement to nearly any savory dish: thyme.



When pan roasting most any food, I often employ my favorite flavor-infusing method. It goes something like this. Begin cooking (insert item here – quail, livers, mushrooms, scallops, parsnips, etc.) in a very hot pan with some oil. When they have begun to brown, reduce the heat slightly, add a knob of butter and, when this begins to foam, flip the item being cooked and quickly add a crushed clove of garlic and a sprig of fresh thyme.

This is where my favorite bit happens. Every sprig of thyme is a string of potential olfactory munitions. When you drop them into the nutty, foaming butter, each little, teardrop leaf swells in the heat until it bursts in a succession of miniscule explosions that are not unlike a string of fire crackers. A tiny celebration of flavor. But it is the aroma that moves me. It’s an incomparably rich and savory perfume reminiscent of family roasts and campfires and garden walks in the sun.

Sigh. How can I not fall in love?