Angelica, Angelica archangelica, is a tall, stout, sweet-scented plant of the carrot family, its hollow stems candied as a green sweetmeat and its roots and seeds used to flavour liqueurs. Its names lift it above the ordinary: angelica, the angelic herb, and archangelica, for the archangel, Michael in some tellings, Gabriel or Raphael in others, who was said to have revealed the plant in a dream as a protection and remedy in time of plague. It was reckoned to flower about the feast day of an archangel, which reinforced the heavenly association, a piece of folklore recorded here as history.
Angelica has a genuine and much older practical history in Scandinavia than its plague-legend suggests: the Sami people and other northern Scandinavians gathered and cultivated wild angelica as a valued food plant long before the archangel story attached to it, its stalks eaten raw or cooked and its value great enough that angelica gardens and even individual plants were, in places, privately owned and inherited property, a genuinely significant food resource in a short northern growing season. Candied angelica stem, dyed green, remains a traditional decoration for cakes and desserts in Britain and France today, one of the few candied fruits or stems still commercially produced by the old method of slow sugar impregnation.