Dialogue: Smell of summer behind the dishes

By JOE BENNETT

A friend confided that she would find it hard to live without basil.

"Basil?" I said. "Basil," she said.

"Oh," I said, "basil. I thought you meant Basil."

Since she failed to spot the capital letter I explained that I had known four Basils. One was an affable porter with a bottomless fund of war stories, another was a bored cricket coach and a keen pederast. The other two were cats.

"No," she said, "I meant basil. The herb. Haven't you heard of herbs?"

I was forced to admit that mine had not been a herbal upbringing. Wild thyme might have grown on the local hills, but there was no way it was going to find its way into our kitchen. Besides, we had three herbs in that kitchen already - salt, pepper and a fierce brown sauce. They catered for all tastes.

She tried to interrupt but she had opened a deep vein of memory and I was not to be stopped.

Salt, I told her, came in a plastic thing we called a cellar. Pepper came in an identical plastic thing that we called nothing at all. You could tell them apart by the holes in the top. Salt had one hole through which the stuff flowed freely when you jabbed it with a fork. Pepper had six.

You could also distinguish between them by taste. Salt made food taste salty. Pepper didn't. The pepper of the day was that dried and powdered stuff that looked like dirty dandruff but lacked its flavour.

But the best of all herbs was the fierce brown sauce. If you liked the stuff, you put it on everything. One dab of it made all food taste like, well, fierce brown sauce.

It sat on the table like a virility test, and was popular mainly with fathers and smokers, which were the same thing.

She asked if we had no real herbs at all.

"Well," I said, "there was parsley but no one ate it. It served mainly to separate trays of meat in a butcher's window, and even that went away when they invented the bright plastic stuff that could sit all day in a blood puddle without wilting."

To be fair to her, I confessed that we did know the names of other herbs - sage, rosemary, simon, garfunkel and so on - but they played no part in Anglo-Saxon cuisine of the baby-boomer times. Had I found a herb in my fish fingers I would have removed it with surgical precision.

If my generation thought of herbs at all, we associated them with medieval witchcraft or folk music, neither of which appealed, though if pushed I'd prefer the witchcraft. She said that I was out of touch and that herbs were in.

"Oh," I said, "yes, I know that. You've only got to glance at a restaurant menu to see a list as long as your arm of the herbal additions to every dish. And what a difference they make."

"Really?" she said.

"Yes," I said, "really. They halve the size of the meal, double the price but have no noticeable effect on the flavour."

She said I was just saying that and I admitted that I was. Furthermore, I was meaning it. I told her I had little interest in the foodism that seems to have swept the affluent world in the past decade or two and I had no desire to be the next lisping celebrity chef setting lonely female hearts athrob with a pint of olive oil and a loin of pork.

"But herbs are big business," she said. "Herbalism has made a comeback. Traditional herbal remedies can be traced back to the Middle Ages."

I asked her to correct me if was wrong but weren't the Middle Ages a time when most people were dead by the age of 30?

She said nothing.

I said I suspected herbal remedies were popular with well people. Sick people, I said, went straight to the GP.

"What about St John's wort?" she said.

I said I didn't know he'd had one.

"But herbs are natural," she said.

"So," I said, "is the tsetse fly. And anthrax for that matter. And death."

I'd gone too far. She made to leave. Stay, I said, and I took her tenderly by the hand and drew her from the sofa.

The dogs raised their heads in curiosity as I led her, as, it has to be said, I lead few women, into the kitchen. Silently I reached past the sink full of dishes and the dog bowls and I drew from the windowsill a pot.

"Basil," I said.

"But ... " she said, and then words let her down.

"I love basil," I said. "It smells of summer."