Alexanders – the Lenten pot-herb of the coastal lane

Alexanders is a tall umbellifer with glossy dark green leaves and yellow-green flowerheads, common on coastal lanes and chalk verges throughout England, and almost entirely forgotten as a kitchen plant. It tastes somewhere between celery, parsley, and asparagus, and for several centuries it was the standing pot-herb of the Lenten kitchen.

How to know it

Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum) is one of the easier umbellifers to learn. The leaves are glossy and dark green, divided into three broad leaflets per stem rather than the fine fern-like cuts of hemlock or cow parsley. The flowerheads are yellow-green, not white, and the smell of a crushed leaf is fresh and faintly aromatic, somewhere between celery and parsley.

The plant grows up to about a metre. Stems are smooth, hollow, and pale green, sometimes with a faint reddish flush near the base on older stalks. By June the flowers have given way to ridged black seed pods that ripen on the plant and stay there into autumn. Once you have seen a good colony of alexanders in flower in late April, you will recognise the yellow-green head at fifty paces for the rest of your life.

The usual umbellifer warning applies. Hemlock grows in similar ground, has white flowers, purple-blotched stems, and an unpleasant smell when crushed. Flowerhead colour is the first check: yellow-green is alexanders, white is not.

Where it grows

Alexanders was introduced to Britain by the Romans, almost certainly as a kitchen plant, and naturalised along the southern and eastern coasts. It is now common on coastal lanes from Cornwall up the east coast to Norfolk and Yorkshire, on the chalk verges of southern England, and in the corners of old churchyards and ruined gardens where Romans, monks, or both once grew it deliberately.

The habitat tells you something. It prefers light, well-drained soil, often a little salty, and tolerates the wind off the sea better than most umbellifers. On the chalk it follows the field edges and the unploughed margins. In a Norfolk lane in late April, alexanders is the dominant plant at car-window height, replacing the cow parsley that takes over by mid-May.

In the Lenten kitchen

For most of its working life in Britain, alexanders was a pot-herb of the lean months. By the end of Lent the winter stores were running low, the new garden vegetables had not yet come in, and what was up in the hedgerows was nettle, alexanders, wild garlic, and the first of the cow parsley. Smallholders gathered the young alexanders shoots and lower leaves and dropped them into the pot with whatever else the kitchen had – salt pork, a small piece of bacon, beans from the autumn, a knob of fresh goat cheese stirred in at the end.

The bitter-and-soft pairing was the structural principle. Pot-herbs gathered from hedges and verges in a Lenten diet needed something soft and fatty to balance the sharp aromatic edge of the greens, and fresh goat cheese was what crofters and smallholders had to hand. The same logic shows up in Italian and Greek cooking with bitter spring greens and ricotta, in northern French cooking with sorrel and crème fraîche, in early English recipes with hedge greens and curd cheese. The pairing is older than any of the kitchen books that record it.

Jane Grigson’s record

Jane Grigson, in her Vegetable Book of 1978, records the goat cheese pairing alongside young forced rhubarb in a Lenten note that is one of the clearest English accounts of the dish. Grigson is documenting a habit, not inventing one. The pairing was already there in the practical kitchen long before the recipe got written down.

What Grigson did for alexanders, more than recording the recipe, was put the plant back in front of cooks. Her Vegetable Book is the one twentieth-century reference that takes the hedgerow plants seriously as food rather than as botanical curiosities. The Penguin paperback edition is still findable second-hand and worth a shelf place if your kitchen runs anywhere close to the verge.

How to use it now

Three preparations cover most of what the plant is good for.

Young shoots and lower leaves, finely chopped and folded into a potato or root vegetable mash before frying. The scones recipe in The May Eve issue is the standing example, and the same dough takes well to whatever sharp green is on the verge that week.

The stems, peeled and blanched briefly in salted water, dressed with butter and a squeeze of lemon, and eaten as a starter or a side. Older books call it the country asparagus and the description is fair.

A few young leaves chopped through a soft cheese (goat’s curd, ricotta, or a young fresh cheddar) with black pepper and lemon zest, spread on toast for breakfast.

The window is short. By the time the flowerheads are fully out the stems have toughened and the leaves have coarsened; gather in the first three weeks of April and into the first days of May, and let the rest of the colony set seed for next year.

Sources: Jane Grigson, Vegetable Book (1978) · Richard Mabey, Food for Free · Plantlife species page