Sweet cicely – the cottage garden’s sugar saver

Sweet cicely comes up early on the north side of a wall, fern-like in leaf, soft to the touch, and every part of it – leaf, green seed, root – tastes of aniseed. In kitchens before sugar was cheap it was the household sweetener for anything sharp, the plant a cook reached for when the rhubarb came in or the first gooseberries needed taking off the heat. Most modern gardeners do not know it.

How to know it

Sweet cicely (Myrrhis odorata) is an umbellifer with fern-like leaves divided into many fine leaflets, flat heads of small white flowers by the end of April, and a clear aniseed smell when a leaf is crushed between the fingers. The plant grows to about a metre and a half on a good site, with hollow ridged stems and seed pods that start green and ridged, slowly turning glossy black as they ripen through the summer.

Identification matters. Sweet cicely sits in the carrot family alongside several plants that are not safe, hemlock in particular, which grows in the same kind of damp shaded ground. Hemlock has purple-blotched stems, a sharper-cut leaf, and an unpleasant smell when bruised. If your plant lacks the soft aniseed scent on the crushed leaf, it is not sweet cicely. Walk away.

Where it grows

Sweet cicely likes shade, damp soil, and the north side of things. Old cottage gardens kept it by the kitchen door, often on the shady side of the wall where nothing else would settle. In the wild it has naturalised on roadside verges and lanesides in northern England, southern Scotland, and parts of Wales, often around the sites of old monastic gardens and former cottage plots. It is one of the first real greens of the year – up before the alexanders, up before the wild garlic shows above the leaf mould.

The household sugar saver

Before sugar was cheap, kitchens reached for cicely whenever something tart needed softening. A good handful of leaves dropped into a pan of rhubarb, gooseberries, or plums on the stove cuts the sourness by about half. The fruit comes off the heat sweeter, with no added sugar, and faintly aniseed-flavoured. It is the kind of flavour that disappears under custard and lingers in jam.

The same logic gave the plant its older name, sugar saver. Victorian cottage gardens grew a clump by the door for exactly this reason. By the time refined sugar became cheap enough for everyday cooking, cicely had gone out of the books and out of the gardens with it, surviving mainly in the still-room manuals of the previous century and in a few stubborn northern gardens.

The still-room use

The still-room use was gentler. Nicholas Culpeper, in The Complete Herbal of 1653, records cicely water as a tonic for a weak stomach and a drink for convalescents. The aniseed scent clears the head; the leaf is mild and the preparation gentle.

A cordial made by simmering the leaves with water and a little sugar, then bottled with lemon juice, keeps for a week in the fridge and gives the cleanest, most unexpected May drink stirred into sparkling water. A spoonful folded into stewed rhubarb replaces the sugar entirely. Culpeper’s recommendation was a settled cup of warm cicely water for someone coming out of an illness, which is closer to the modern idea of a herbal tea than to anything pharmaceutical.

How to use it now

Three uses earn the plant a place by the kitchen door.

A handful of leaves in the pan with rhubarb, gooseberries, plums, or sharp early strawberries: sourness halved, no added sugar, faintly aniseed.

A few young leaves chopped through a green salad: distinctive but not overpowering, particularly good with goat cheese and the first broad bean tops.

The green seed (picked while still soft and pale, not when it has gone glossy and black) chopped finely and folded through cream for a pudding, or sprinkled over a fruit compote.

The cordial recipe from The May Eve issue uses the leaves in compressed form. Make a bottle on a warm evening, keep it cold, and use within the week. Anything left can be folded into a fool or a syllabub for the weekend.

Sources: Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal (1653) · RHS species reference · Richard Mabey, Food for Free