The Odd Occurrence of Orega...No Clue

Dear Tamar:

My husband and I have an outdoor planter that has been a great herb garden. This year, we were surprised to see a few herbs came back all on their own! We’re used to mint growing like a weed, and we always know what to do with chives and green onions. But what do we do with LOTS of fresh oregano? The plant is already huge. Other than drying it, I’m at a loss. Help!

-Orega…No Clue

Dear Orega…No Clue,

For a reason I can’t quite understand, herbs make me think of cognitive biases—those tricks our own brains play on us. I, personally, find the idea of unraveling this strange mental twitch—figuring out why leafy plants used for food are associated, for me, with mind games—compelling. But such discovery wouldn’t help you with your oregano plant in a timely manner.

My only option, then, is to try to help you by way of the cognitive biases which spring to mind unsolicited, like volunteer oregano. (You probably know that plants which grow without being planted are called “volunteers.” I didn’t know the term until I was nearly thirty. I found it charming and philosophically perplexing—mostly in its suggestion that plants that grew from a gardener’s seed didn’t choose life quite as vividly as the others, that existence was somehow forced on them. Maybe I over-intellectualize all plants.)

When I consider your oregano, I think of the Paradox of Choice. The paradox of choice—which you probably know as well as you do the terminology of botanical volunteerism, but just in case—refers to how decision-making is hindered rather than helped by an abundance of options. Here’s what the paradox of choice has to do with oregano: The contemporary North American kitchen is global. In any major newspaper’s cooking section, you might encounter recipes needing lemongrass, cilantro, and makrut lime and others requiring bay leaves, thyme, and rosemary, and others calling for curry and fenugreek leaves, and others Italian basil, and others Thai basil, or flat-leaf parsley, or curly-leaf parsley, or tarragon, mint, marjoram, oregano, thyme, savory, rosemary, sage, chives, and probably a dozen more I’m forgetting.

In cultures where cooking is strictly regional, on the other hand, a cook is unlikely to ever consider more than two or three seasonings. Greek cooking is varied and rich, but uses an herb roster that’s mostly limited to dill, parsley, mint, and oregano. Ligurian cooking comprises hundreds of recipes and dishes. But all rely on some constellation of Genovese basil, marjoram, and parsley.

There’s much to appreciate about the North American situation—namely that we can travel, culinarily at least, without going any further than our local supermarkets. The drawback is our daily exposure to the paradox of choice. With every herb in the world at your fingertips, it’s easy to forget that all herbs serve one purpose: to accentuate, to heighten and brighten and contour flavor. We’re exposed to so many cuisines’ materials and methods that it can be difficult to trust that the herb you have before you is doing enough, and easy to wonder if there’s a higher height your food might be reaching. Regional cooks face no such crises. They deal with regional constraints. Their options for herbs are limited to whichever grow well in their climate. They turn to those two or three each time they need an herbal effect, a situation which provides them easy decision-making and constant opportunities for ingenuity. The whole situation is somewhat simpler.

This leads to the second cognitive bias: Maslow’s hammer, or the Law of the Instrument—generally articulated as “if your only tool is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.” In the case of herbs, however, Maslow’s hammer is not a caution but a description of how cuisine develops, and how cooking is done. Maslow’s hammer is, actually—given our predicament within the Paradox of Choice—my prescription for your oregano. (In my first book I believe I used Maslow’s hammer as a prescription for parsley.)

Imagine you are in Greece. You want to make a salad. Armed with oregano, you scatter the salad with it. It is, after all, the available herb. If it were cold in your imagined Greece and you had fish, you’d make psari plaki, a baked fish dish that includes oregano. If you happened to be in the mood for lamb and eggplant, you’d make moussaka, relying for herbal fragrance, again, on oregano. As you would for chicken or for gravy. In fact, cooking, in general, would amount to your picking up your figurative herbal hammer and pounding away. The same holds for Ligurian cooking, which treats marjoram, a botanical sister of oregano, similarly. Imagine yourself in coastal Italy and make Ligurian pesto with oregano instead of marjoram, or the vegetarian polpettone Genovese, letting oregano assume marjoram’s duties.

I’m instructing you to pretend that you live in a world where your only herbs are the mint, chives, and oregano you mentioned above. The cognitive biases urged by my recommendation are as fecund as the volunteer herbs in your garden. I suggest polarized thinking, when in fact you can easily do a thought experiment in which you limit yourself, while still living in the global world we share. I’m overgeneralizing in the extreme. I’m also returning to a refrain I revisit every several weeks: When you don’t know what to do in the kitchen, impose constraints. They help.

Dear cook, you mention drying oregano, which is a wonderful thing to do, because the herb dries well, keeping its strong aroma. Dry as much of it as you like, and return to the mindset of an oregano-dependent when it comes time to use what you’ve dried. That is the mindset I’m trying to foster, through my clumsy invocation of useful limitations and thought experiments. Here we are: it may take some intentional Cognitive Dissonance to turn your Orega…No into an Orega…Yes.