Rosemary and Garlic Bread and the Folklore of the Rose of Mary

Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–I’m so glad you’re here!

Today, I’m continuing my Lenten series on Biblical foods. So far, I’ve covered bread, olive oil and olives, honey, and this week, I’m featuring some Biblical herbs and spices. The herbs I’ve decided to write about–basil and rosemary–are complex herbs with lots of beneficial qualities and rich folklore surrounding them.

Yesterday, I highlighted basil, which is one of my favorite herbs. today, I’m featuring rosemary:

Rosemary is also one of my favorite herbs and I use it almost daily in my cooking. It smells unbelievably good and lends a nice woodsy, almost resiny flavor with hints of pine and aromatic lavender to any dish. It’s wonderful when chopped up very fine and sprinkled over salads, used in salad dressings, soups, stews, baked goods and on grilled and roasted meats. Chicken, lamb, pork and fish all benefit from a hit of rosemary–but use a judicious hand–it is a pungent herb with oils that can take over a flavor profile in more delicate dishes.

When Mr. Stone Soup and I first got married, I was just beginning to experiment with rosemary, and thought it was quite exotic, since I didn’t have ready access to fresh rosemary in the markets where I grew up–well, at least not at that time. The dried rosemary needles smelled really good, but had to be ground up in a spice grinder or mortar and pestle.

The first time I encountered fresh rosemary was at a winery in Napa that Mr. Stone Soup and I were visiting shortly after we got married. Then, as now, I had a super-sniffer and when strolling down the walkway to the entrance of the winery, I smelled rosemary and paused: there before us were huge shrubs of rosemary flanking the walkway. Mr. Stone Soup asked if I wanted him to pick me a couple of twigs of it. Being a good girl, I declined because this felt like stealing. We walked inside and while tasting, Mr. Soup asked if we could have a couple of twigs. Not only did the server agree, but he grabbed a handle-bag and some shears and went outside and snipped a whole bag of it for me. I was delighted but slightly taken aback at his generosity. He explained that rosemary grows like a weed in our semi-mediterranean climate and that they had to have the shrubs hacked back mercilessly every so often to keep them from taking over the walkway. He was thrilled to get rid of some of it and asked if we wanted more. Since it was far more than I could use for the next month, I declined; but as it grows year-round around here, it has been a pantry staple ever since.

There is so much to share about rosemary, I almost don’t know where to begin. I suppose I should start by saying that rosemary, like basil, is not explicitly mentioned in the Bible. However, just as there is a rich lore surrounding basil, there is an equally rich lore that has grown up around rosemary, particularly as it relates to the Virgin Mary, for which rosemary is named: the rose of Mary.

There is a wonderful story that plants were given the gift of speech after Jesus’ birth. As the Holy Family made their way from Isreal to Egypt, the plants along the way engaged in verbal sparring, each declaring that they had better gifts to offer the Holy Family to assist them on their trip. The lowly rosemary plant remained quiet during these oral jousts. When the family stopped to rest, Mary washed the laundry and looked for a suitable place upon which to lay the clothes. She found many of the plants, such as wheat plants and rosebushes inappropriate for the job, but the rosemary bush, being shorter, broad and sweet-smelling, provided the perfect place to leave the clothes to dry. The rosemary bush quietly rejoiced in being honored with the task.

When Mary removed the laundry from the bush, the clothes smelled wonderfully fresh and would have absorbed some of the rosemary oil, which is touted for its anti-bacterial and anti-microbial properties. But more on that in tomorrow’s post.

More poetically, some of the dye from Mary’s blue cloak had bled onto the plant, dying the rosemary bush’s otherwise white flowers, a cornflower blue. Legend has it that is why rosemary flowers are now blue, and the plant has carried Mary’s name ever since–the rose of Mary, rosemary. Now, clearly there are rosemary plants that have white (and even pink) flowers, but this story simply took my breath away with its poetic beauty.

As I mentioned earlier, rosemary plays well with any manner of ingredients: meat, fish, fowl, etc. It is particularly good when paired with garlic–the two together are a classic flavor combination and frequently used together. Today, I’m featuring a recipe for my basic bread with rosemary and garlic, which is just heavenly: