Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–so glad you’re here!
I hope you’ve been enjoying exploring Biblical foods with me over the last few weeks. As part of my Lenten observation, I have been taking a deep dive into some of the more prominent foods of the Bible. In the first week of Lent, I featured bread; for week two, I featured olive oil; and last week, I featured honey.
This week, I’m going to take a closer look at Biblical herbs, flowers and spices. Herbs and spices such as myrrh, cinnamon and calamus are featured prominently throughout the Bible in ceremonies and annointings, while dill, cumin, coriander and mint were used to flavor food, along with other aromatics such as garlic and onions.
And then there are the herbs, that while not specifically mentioned in the Bible, have beautifully rich legends that have grown up around them. I’m featuring one of them today: sweet basil. The other is rosemary, which I’ll feature tomorrow.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I have a particular fondness for sweet basil. After doing a little research on basil’s ties to Christianity, I am now even more charmed by it:
According to one legend, sweet basil was found growing around Christ’s tomb after the Resurrection. Some Greek Orthodox churches still use it to prepare holy water and pots of sweet basil are placed below the altar. Another legend has it that St. Helena, who set out on a pilgrimage in about 326 AD, was led to the Holy Cross of the Sepulcher by the sweet smell of basil that grew on the hillside. After doing a little digging, she discovered the Holy Cross. I can only imagine the peppery-clovey-sweet scent of a whole hillside of sweet basil–who could resist such a heady, spicy fragrance?!
Probably my favorite way to enjoy sweet basil is this very straightforward pesto sauce:
Pesto is among the most versatile of sauces I can think of. I use it to make pesto-asparagus-pasta, pesto-salmon, zucchini boats, as a base for pizzas and drizzled over tomato soup for the best ever tomato-basil soup.
In addition to having wonderfully rich legends surrounding it, basil is also a nutritional powerhouse. The only problem is how much basil you’d have to consume in one sitting to get enough to fully realize its nutritional benefits. A “serving” of sweet basil is 100 grams. Here’s what 100 grams of sweet basil looks like:
However, if you did eat that much sweet basil in a sitting, here are the nutritional benefits you’d get:
30% recommended daily allowance of vitamin A, 20% of vitamin C, a whopping 350% of vitamin K, 43% of copper, 50% of manganese and 18% of iron. Since you’d likely only eat about a tenth of that in one serving, the numbers don’t look nearly as impressive, except for the vitamin K, of which you’d still get a good 30-35% of your rda. Vitamin K is important in blood clotting and bone strength. Basil is also rich in antioxidants such as lutein, zeaxanthin, beta-carotene and beta-cryptoxanthin and essential oils like eugenol, linalool and citronellol, all of which help to regulate blood pressure and blood sugar and to reduce inflammation. In theory, I guess it could be classified as a “superfood,” except that it’s mainly used in small amounts as a flavoring additive.
In order to get the most benefit from these nutrients, basil is best eaten raw, or added at the very end of cooking, as heat destroys the delicate essential oils and antioxidants.
Basil is just starting to come back to the markets in my corner of the world. I found Thai basil last weekend and made a lovely little pesto to go with some leftover pasta I had on hand. The leaves on the Thai basil are quite a bit smaller and (to me at least), Thai basil has a slight bitterness to it, so I had to do flavor-balancing with a little more cheese and a little more salt than I would normally use. Once balanced, the result was a delicious sneak peek of summer!
I hope you will join me tomorrow as I share a wonderful recipe that will showcase not only rosemary, but also garlic!
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
