When I told my wife I was off to find some lovage, she was supportive. Levisticum officinale, after all, is a close relative of celery, parsley and dill, three of her favorite plants to eat.
Lovage plant leaves can be used as an herb and the seeds as a spice. Photo: Ari LeVaux
Lovage is hard to find in stores, but we have a plant. Or at least, we know of a plant. It resides behind the cabin where she and I first lived together. The only problem, from a lovage perspective, is we don’t live there anymore.
I first experienced lovage in the form of Rapunzel brand Vegetable Bouillon with Herbs.
It remained on my radar for years, more as a whimsical word than anything I could picture. I didn’t know if it was a plant, animal, fungus or what.
A few years later at the farmers market I found out what it was, and brought a lovage plant home to the cabin. I planted it near the garden, where it got a lot of water and grew taller than me, like some kind of mutant celery plant on herbal steroids.
What it tastes like
Originally brought over by European settlers, lovage remained after settlements were abandoned, doing just fine on its own. This tenacious plant runs wild from Florida to Saskatchewan.
The lovage cabin’s new residents don’t seem to prioritize landscaping. July had been hot, without a single drop of rain, and the town was drying up. As I rode my bike down the gravel alley, I wondered what I would find.
The unfenced yard was a brownscape, with one lovable exception. A patch of green in a parched yard that had been left for dead, the lovage, amazingly, didn’t even look stressed. It was smaller than it used to grow, only about knee-height, but looked happy. I knelt down, cleaned up some dead stalks around the base, pulled away some errant grass, and cut some lovage.
The early New Englanders had myriad Old World uses for the plant, the entirety of which is edible. They used to candy the root and chew the seed in order to stay alert during long church services.
Indeed, the seeds will numb your mouth, like Szechuan peppercorns, and the leaves, while not as intense, nonetheless have the piercing aroma of enhanced celery. This bitter mouth buzz makes lovage popular among serious mixologists and edgy cooks alike.
Chopped and tossed with a salad or mixed in a dressing, simmered in soups, rubbed on meat or mixed into your drink, lovage belongs in a lot of places.
Where to find it
If you don’t have a local stash of lovage, it can be tricky to score. Big city grocers will sometimes stock it, and lovage seed is readily available online, which can be sown in spring or late summer (and chewed year-round in church). It’s worth asking the plant people at the farmers market if they know where any living lovage might be found. A quick check at my local store found lovage in three separate vegetarian bouillon brands, with Rapunzel remaining the best of the lot.
Lovage Emulsion
- 3-6 lovage leaves
(or 1 tsp extract) - 1 clove garlic,
minced or pressed - 1 whole egg
- 2 tbsp lime juice
- 1 tbsp cider vinegar
- ½ tsp Dijon mustard
- ¼ tsp salt
- 1½ cups oil
(I like a light, fruity olive oil; safflower, sunflower and canola work, too)
In a clean blender or food processor, add egg, lime juice, lovage leaves, cider vinegar, salt, dijon and garlic. Blend until smooth. If it’s not enough material for the blade to catch, double the recipe. You won’t be sorry.
Then, as one does when making mayonnaise, cross your heart or do any other ritual you might have, and begin slowly adding the oil in a thin stream with the blade running. Do not add more oil until the first few drops have completely dispersed. Then add a little more. Repeat at a snail’s pace, blade running, until you’ve added half a cup, at which point, if you haven’t screwed up, you can add oil a little more quickly.
After about a cup you will hear the sound thicken. Keep going until it’s all stuck to the side of the blender and not sliding down. Scrape it off with a rubber spatuala.
