Ingredients · Herb
Tarragon
Artemisia dracunculus · Asteraceae (daisy family)
What it’s like, and how to use it
How to use it
In béarnaise, and in any cream or butter sauce for chicken, fish or eggs. In fines herbes with chervil, parsley and chives. Steeped in vinegar. With roast chicken, under the skin. In Georgian chakapuli with lamb and sour plums. Add it late — heat flattens it.
With food
Chicken and eggs. Butter and cream. Vinegar and mustard. Fish and shellfish. Mushroom. Asparagus. Tomato. Lemon.
With spices
Chervil, parsley and chives, the fines herbes. Black pepper. Mustard. Shallot. Fennel seed.
With tea
Not a tea ingredient, though a green Georgian soda made from it is.
Its story
Where it comes from
Grows wild across much of Eurasia and North America. The shop's notes name no origin, so our lot is unconfirmed. Russian tarragon is a different, coarser thing — if a plant grew easily from seed, it was not the French kind.
What happened
Dracunculus is Latin for little dragon, for its coiled roots, and legend took that further — tarragon was said to be the remedy for the bites of snakes and dragons. The name runs back through Medieval Latin, Byzantine Greek tarchon and Arabic tarkhon to French estragon. Its great dish arrived in 1836, when a chef opening a restaurant in Henry IV's former residence at Saint-Germain-en-Laye finished an egg-and-butter sauce with shallot, vinegar and tarragon and named it for the king's home province of Béarn. Its other great use is a drink: in 1887 a pharmacist's apprentice in Kutaisi named Mitrofan Lagidze mixed tarragon syrup into sparkling water, and Tarkhuna — bright green, and still sold — spread across the Soviet Union from a Tbilisi plant from 1927. Renaissance gardeners believed tarragon sprang from a linseed tucked inside an onion; Mattioli tried it and reported that nothing happened.
On the shelf with it
Sold on its own, and in these blends.
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Tarragon Leaf
Regular price From $5.99 CADRegular price
