Sweet marjoram

Sweet marjoram has a lemon, almost lavender scent and is used to flavour stewed or grilled meats, soups, vegetable stews, roasts, salads and salad dressings.

This week we welcome Sweet marjoram in the box . We’ve been growing this beauty up the top of the garden in the experimental herb bed and have been watching it grow thick and lush. We harvested them this week just as they are starting to go to flower, some people say this is the perfect time to harvest them.

Some of the sisters of Sweet marjoram include: Oregano; Kekik; Za’ata; Dittany; Regani; and Bible hyssop. There are some 43 wild and cultivated documented sister species including Sweet marjoram in this genus, all originating from the Mediterranean. Sweet marjoram produces white flowers, has small shiny leaves and has a sweet, less bitter flavour compared to some of its sisters.

The sisters are harvested around the world for food, for tea, for traditional medicine, for pharmaceutical medicine, and for the cosmetic industry. Some have higher concentrated amounts of volatile oils for distillation and medicine, and others are prized for their flavour for foods.

Each sister cultivar has specific flavour characteristics that hold different cultural and culinary importance and tradition for peoples. Sweet marjoram has a lemon, almost lavender scent and is now cultivated for food all around the world to flavour: stewed or grilled meats; soups; vegetable stews, roasts, salads and salad dressings.

We bought these Sweet marjoram plants locally as transplants, and I believe this cultivar has been selected to be pungent but sweet, bold but familiar and acceptable to the generalised local pallet. Bitter flavours are really important parts of local food traditions throughout the Mediterranean, where local foraging traditions of wild plant foods, what we may call endearingly weeds, have occurred inside and beside pastoral and horticultural practices for thousands of years.

Next time I’m in the Mediterranean I hope I’m lucky enough to travel to local markets to taste all the local marjoram sisters as weeds and herbs. Although glaringly this wouldn’t be possible everywhere as the practice of foraging wild plant foods such as Za’ata, a marjoram sister, is illegal for Palestinians.

I was naively surprised to read that most of the worlds Sweet marjoram continues to be harvested commercially from wild populations. When I think of industrialised agriculture, the last thing I think of is wild plant harvesting. Obviously foraging wild plants, and wild plant industrial harvesting are two entirely different political and cultural practices. One extracts for profit, the other tends and cultivates for subsistence, love and life.

I find it interesting to now imagine shopping at Carrefour, a huge supermarket chain in Turkey that I got lost in years ago when I spent time in Istanbul: Now knowing that the sister marjoram I was buying, wrapped in plastic next to imported bananas, was probably a wild plant food.