Cooking Tames Sage’s Flavor

With long cooking, sage’s assertive raw taste mellows, and it bumps up the flavor of starchy foods and mild meats.

by Ruth LivelyJune 1997from issue # 9

For years I grow sage and never used it . I lie with its facial expression , but my palate cringed at its powerful , almost medicinal olfactory perception . I ’m not a fan of poultry stuffing , and I ’ve yet to tackle sausage balloon - making , the only two use I knew of for salvia .

But one day I had a salvia waking up . I tot some to the potatoes I roast on a regular basis , and it made a favorite recipe even better . Then I remembered a pot of white beans I ’d eaten in Italy , redolent with sage and garlic and Madagascar pepper . I commence to depend around for other way to use salvia . Pretty soon my one big plant was n’t bragging enough .

With farsighted cookery , salvia ’s assertive raw sense of taste mellows to an understatement . It bump up the flavor of starchy foods likepotatoes , edible bean , squash , and stuffing , and of mild meats like pork barrel , chicken , and veal . Briefly cooked , sage stands up well to more fast-growing relish like anchovies or Allium sativum . Insaltimbocca , a traditional Italian knockout , the sage is sunnily stiff — very overnice with the saltiness of the prosciutto and the sweetness of the wine .

Tuscan beansare wonderfully versatile . In cool weather they ’re delicious red-hot , topped with a grill sausage balloon or a chop . A little additional cooking liquid turns them into a solid soup . wangle down and mashed , they ’re the foundation for a vegetable dip . In summer , I care to debilitate the dome and set them while hot with a flavorful vinaigrette , then eat them at room temperature atop a seam of endive or on bruschetta .

I harvest sage as I need it because it does n’t keep long in the icebox . Any wet on the leaves quickly causes them to call on black with decay . Sprigs will last a duad of days if hive away in a dry , loosely closed shaping pocketbook . you may deputize dehydrated sage in the bean , but the Irish potato and the saltimbocca depend on fresh sage . Fortunately , sage farewell hold light frosts , so I usually can reap into December in my Connecticut garden .

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