Fennel. Common and sweet fennel are grown in our gardens both for the table and for their seeds, which are used in cooking and medicine. [1]

Several modern Apiciuses advise people to wrap fish in fennel leaves to make it firmer and tastier, whether it is to be cooked fresh or brined.

The green and tender fennel tips add flavour to our salads. In hot countries, the young shoots and upper part of the root are served seasoned with pepper, oil, and vinegar, in the same way as we dress celery. [2]

Common fennel requires no special cultivation: when the seedlings are six weeks or two months old, they are thinned and hoed. It requires little watering unless the base is to be eaten, in which case sweet fennel should be chosen. It is planted out like celery and spaced at intervals of one foot in every direction. The weeds are removed carefully, following which it is watered and earthed up. It grows, blanches, and forms a stem-base larger than that of celery, which it even surpasses in quality.

Florence fennel is superior to ours, either because the Parisian climate is ill-suited to it or, more probably, because we do not cultivate it properly. Italians make much use of Florence fennel, the flavour, quality, and fragrance of which charm the senses of taste and smell. The tips of the young leaves are used as a salad seasoning and the tips of the young shoots are a delicacy, whether they are eaten with salt or without seasoning.

As this form of sensuousness has spread to England, where it is becoming ever more popular, Miller has not shrunk from growing the ‘finocchio’ and giving instructions for its cultivation in his dictionary, to which I refer interested gardeners. [3]

Notes

1. Common fennel is Foeniculum vulgare; sweet fennel is Foeniculum vulgare variety dulce. Sweet fennel seeds are bigger, and their essential oils have been used for flavouring and in medicine from 1,300 BC . See D. J. Mabberley, The Plant-book: a Portable Dictionary of the Vascular Plants (Cambridge, 1997), 286.

2. These leaves and shoots taste of aniseed.

3. Florence fennel or ‘finocchio’ is Foeniculum vulgare variety azoricum . See D. J. Mabberley, The Plant-book: a Portable Dictionary of the Vascular Plants (Cambridge, 1997), 286. Miller recommends the use of Italian rather than of English seeds, because the latter ‘are very apt to degenerate’, and sowing at intervals of three weeks from February to July (article ‘ Foeniculum ’, 5. Foeniculum dulce Azoricum […] Finochia, vulgo, Miller, 1752).