Herbs

For as long as humans have been cooking, we have been cooking with herbs. In our eternal effort to make foods more agreeable, prehistoric cooks plucked a few leaves from wild plants and added them to the fire or stew pot in a practice that was already ancient when later generations took the first bold steps towards agriculture and civilization. Herbs and spices are so fundamental and essential to the art of cooking that I often wonder if preparing food without them can properly be called cooking at all.