Wild fennel

• By Matty Cremona

The fennel that grows wild throughout the Maltese countryside has its fragrant uses in cooking throughout the Mediterranean, though in Malta we appear to have lost the habit. Matty Cremona shows how to do it. And remember: never pull up wild fennel plants from the ground. In wild fennel, unlike with the domesticated variety in which you use the bulb, the parts used in cooking are all above ground – the fronds and the seeds. Take just one frond from each plant, and only a few of the seeds, to ensure that the plants survive and thrive.

Fennel is a lush aromatic plant that, once brushed against, fills the air with an unforgettable scent, intensely reminiscent of sunny Mediterranean hillsides. Wild fennel is used in lots of Sicilian cooking, and it is the essence of the famous dish pasta alle sarde. The feathery fronds add a warm zest to food, especially when finely chopped into pasta, fish soups and potatoes. Wild fennel is perfect in dressings for winter salads and with a ricotta-and-spinach tart. It blooms towards the end of May, and the flavour and texture of the fronds are better when picked before that. The only way to preserve wild fennel is to freeze it, which turns it limp and dark, though the flavour keeps well.

Delicate yellow fennel flowers are delicious when dusted into herb-and-olive-oil dressings for tomatoes, grilled vegetables, or fish. Bunches of flower-bearing stems can be tied together and hung upside down to dry in a cool and well-ventilated place. The dried flowers are then crumbled into clean jars and used to season foods and dressings in much the same way as the fresh flowers are. You can use them in dishes for which the flavour of fennel seeds is too strong. Try mixing fennel flowers with parsley, garlic and olive oil to pour over seared tuna steaks.

Fennel seeds are collected in autumn from the dried up flower-heads. Store them in clean jars. They impart an excellent flavour to roast meat, winter soups and stews, and to many baked savoury dishes.

Wild fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) is native to the shores of the Mediterranean, and from there it spread east to Asia and north to mainland Europe. It does very well in chalky soil, which is why it thrives in the Maltese countryside. There is a sweet variety, the bulb of which is used in cooking, called Florence fennel (Foeniculum vulgare, var. dulce). The flavour of fennel seeds is very similar to that of aniseed, and there is sometimes confusion between the two. Fennel was one of the three main plants used in the preparation of absinthe, the alcoholic drink that was banned in most of Europe by the 1940s. The laws have since been relaxed, but most of the modern versions of absinthe do not use fennel.

The word ‘fennel’ developed from the Middle English fenel or fenyl, which in turn came from the Anglo-Saxon fenol – and that came from the Latin feniculum. In ancient Greek, fennel was known by the name pronounced ‘marathon’. The ancient Greek city of Marathon was named after the plant (it was the legendary feat of a runner in the Battle of Marathon in 490BC that gave us our name for the marathon run, which curiously means ‘fennel’ run).

The ancient Roman naturalist Pliny had much faith in the medicinal properties of fennel, according no fewer than 22 remedies to it, observing also that ‘serpents eat it when they cast off their old skins, and they sharpen their sight with the juice by rubbing their eyes against the plant.’

John Parkinson, in his Theatricum Botanicum (1640), tells us that the culinary use of fennel was through Italian influence: “The leaves, seede and rootes are both for meate and medicine; the Italians especially doe much delight in the use thereof, and therefore transplant and whiten it, to make it more tender to please the taste, which being sweete and somewhat hot helpeth to digest the crude qualitie of fish and other viscous meats. We use it to lay upon fish or to boyle it therewith and with divers other things, as also the seeds in bread and other things.”

The Maltese word for fennel is bużbież, besbies, busbies, or biżbież, depending on pronunciation. It is an Arabic word, but in Arabic it is used for the spice called mace. The Arabic word for fennel is shumre, but interestingly, in North African Arabic it’s called kamun, from which the name of the island of Kemmuna (Comino) is derived. It has always been taken for granted that Comino gets its name from the cumin plant, or kemmun, though this is not indigenous to Malta and fennel is. It seems more likely that wild fennel, as it is known in North African Arabic, gave its name to the islet. Another curious fact is that buzbeżija means a field of fennel. The area between Birkirkara and Mosta, which goes by that name, would originally have been fennel fields. There is another area called il-Buzbeżija in Gozo.