Tarragon

Tarragon, Artemisia dracunculus, is a slender aromatic perennial of the daisy family with a distinctive sweet, anise-like flavour, indispensable to French cookery. Both its species name and its common name mean little dragon, dracunculus in Latin, and tarragon through the Arabic tarkhun from a Greek word for the same, names given for the serpent-like coil of its roots and for an old belief that the plant cured the bites of venomous creatures and mad dogs. Its genus, Artemisia, is that of the wormwoods and mugworts, named for the goddess Artemis.

French cookery distinguishes true French tarragon from the coarser, far less aromatic Russian tarragon, a related variety that produces fertile seed and so can be grown from seed, unlike French tarragon, which is sterile and must be propagated from cuttings or root division, a genuine horticultural quirk that keeps the finer culinary variety comparatively rare and always vegetatively propagated. Tarragon vinegar and the classic French sauce bearnaise, built on tarragon, egg yolk and butter, remain the herb's best-known modern legacy, a use entirely secular and resting on nothing more than its distinctive anise-sweet flavour.

Tarragon is also one of the few herbs whose flavour survives drying and freezing comparatively well, though French cooks still generally prefer it fresh or preserved in vinegar, judging the dried leaf a pale copy of the living plant's sharper, more volatile anise note.

The whole folklore of tarragon turns on the dragon in its name. By the doctrine of signatures, the old idea that a plant's form reveals its use, its coiled, snake-like roots marked it as a remedy against snakes and other venomous bites, a folk reputation recorded here as history and not as medical claim. It was accordingly counted a protective herb, carried or grown to guard against serpents and, by extension, against harm and the malice of enemies. A quiet, sweet-tasting culinary herb, tarragon carries a symbolism entirely out of scale with its gentle flavour, drawn wholly from the small dragon it was named for.

Its membership in the wormwood genus, Artemisia, links tarragon distantly to mugwort and true wormwood, plants with their own long history of protective and visionary use across Europe and Asia, though tarragon itself, mild and edible, was valued in the kitchen rather than for any of the stronger effects its bitter relatives carried. The genus name honours Artemis, goddess of the hunt and of wild places, an apt patron for a family of plants gathered wild from hedgerow and steppe long before any of them were brought into the garden, tarragon among the mildest and most thoroughly domesticated of a wilder botanical family.