Sweetgrass ✦

Foin d’odeur

What it is

Hierochloe means holy grass: in northern Europe it was strewn before church doors on saints’ days so the coumarin would rise as people walked over it. That same compound puts a single blade in every bottle of Żubrówka and sets the legal ceiling on how much of it a kitchen may use.

In the kitchen

Infuse it dried, never fresh — the coumarin only develops as the blade dries. One blade to 500 ml of cream, twenty minutes off the heat, then out: left longer it goes from hay to cold tobacco.

Goes with

Cream Apple Honey Rye berries Birch syrup Blueberry

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