A home apothecary’s herbal

Hearth & Herb

A home apothecary’s herbal — the plants, methods, and recipes kept on hand at the hearth, written down so they don’t get lost between kitchens.

This is a working notebook, not a shop. Every entry here is something that’s actually dried in a jar, steeped in a cup, or simmered on a stove in a real kitchen. It holds the plants a household keeps close by, the handful of ways to turn them into something useful, and the recipes that get made again every year. It draws on more than one hearth: European cottage gardens, Native North American and Sonoran desert foodways, the kitchens and herbals of China, Korea, Japan, and India, and the ancient resins of Arabia and the Horn of Africa. It grows slowly, a specimen or a recipe at a time, the way a real herbal always has.