The Trouble of Thyme to Dill with Things!

Dear Tamar:

So many herbs! My local farm stand had a giant pile of herbs ... For free! Rosemary, dill, thyme, mint. I took a reasonable size bunch of each. Shared with sister..but now what? Waste not...Give me some ideas for herb forward summer cooking and\or preservation when the abundance is abounding.

-Thyme to Dill with Things!

Dear Thyme to Dill with Things,

I was a senior in college when I started advocating for a moratorium on the death penalty. I’d come across Mumia Abu-Jamal and read Sister Helen Prejean and begun to think more critically about the American carceral system. Upon graduating, I worked for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization who, in the wake of World War II, fed and clothed not only victims of the Nazi Party, but former members who found themselves in need.

The moral fogginess of “bad people” who “deserved” punishment had begun to dawn on me. I could give more examples. The point I’m making is that my early twenties signaled a shift in how I thought about “bad” and “good” and justice and mercy and other notions that had once seemed absolute. It’s when I found myself concerned with human dignity as an unimpeachable value—a concern informed by the Quaker mandate, articulated by William Penn: Let us then try what love can do. (William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693)

I’ve now dragged you through my political-spiritual awakening. Blame it on current events. And the fact that the world is vast and our minds touch all of it, and that my answers to your questions about a surfeit of herbs—the herbal wisdoms of Vietnamese and Persian food—come from people against whom our country has acted with a facile, inhumane view of bad and good and justice and mercy—the kind I began questioning a long time ago.

As you know, for long over a decade, the U.S. fought—nominally to prevent the destabilizing spread of Communism—in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Two million Vietnamese civilians were killed. A ton of bombs was dropped in Laos for every man, woman, and child. The American Friends Service Committee, incidentally, spent the duration providing prosthetics to children who lost limbs to bombs and other ordnance in Southeast Asia on all sides of all borders.

Also as you know, Israel and the U.S. have been bombing Iran. I spent a month in Vietnam and Laos in my early twenties, most of it with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat, learning much about how to use herbs, and about the long arm of suffering. Now, without my needing to consider the “badness” of Iran’s theocratic leadership, I’m overcome by grief for Iranians living where bombs fall.

Herb salads and herb tarts and herbs wrapped in thin rice paper and rice dishes that are half herb—half rice, mountain of herbs beside any soup, stocks of bones and herbs, herb omelets, herb jams. But right now, I struggle to separate the lessons of cuisines—which hold the answers to your questions—from the humans who create them. In other words, tears are in my eyes and a lump in my throat as I advise what might both teach and remind: turn to Vietnamese and Persian cooks. Read anything and everything by Andrea Nguyen. Here’s her Substack:

Read Sofreh, by Nasim Alikhani, and Bottom of the Pot, by Naz Deravian—who is also on a great podcast episode on this Substack:

On Persian cooking and 'accented food' with author Naz Deravian

Read Najmieh Batmanglij. Read Persian Feasts.

I recall traveling through Vietnam and Laos, and I see suffering in the faces of friends whose families live in Tehran. I don’t find myself feeling wanting to rephrase what I’ve learned, but to take this opportunity to acknowledge the teachers and the cultures that taught them.

Dear cook, most of what we know of cooking comes from someone’s cuisine. And someone comes from somewhere. Herbs continue to grow. The sun rises. Dark horses win mayoral primaries. Things are “good” when other things are “bad.” But certainly the thyme has come, if not to completely dill with how many humans are touched each time we do anything but try what love can do, at least to acknowledge that humans are touched. And that they are also we.