Samar Halarnkar: Rosemary, me, and a romance over lamb chops

My reunion with her was recent.

I was working at my desk recently when I suddenly got her sweet, lingering scent from the garden outside, wafting in on a spring breeze. When I looked up, there was no sign of her. I saw the occasional iridescent flash of a dark, little sunbird. Perhaps it was a purple-rumped sunbird, although I am no expert. Bees swarmed the butterfly bush outside, the mango tree beyond was bursting with yellow-green panicles, and the raintree beside it was covered with green seed pods.

Spring was in the air—the sunbirds and bees were busy going about their job of pollinating and renewing life. It had been more than a decade since my last whiff of rosemary, on the other side of the world on the hills of Berkeley in California. She was wild then, unrestrained, her scent everywhere.

Here in Bengaluru, I paused my work and walked out. Then I saw her: smaller, as elegant and confined to a small space, but it was unmistakably her. When I saw her, I was wondering about what to make for lunch.

So, I considered her graceful form and snipped off two branches.

I had never known of rosemary until my teens, when I heard the Simon and Garfunkel song, Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, itself, as I came to learn later, rooted in a 17th century English ballad. I first met them all at New Delhi’s INA market, where they were expensive and exotic foreign herbs. I remember much experimentation with all of them—marinating, basting, roasting and garnishing.

It was rosemary and her meaning that stayed with me. After all, literary history tells us that she symbolised memory, mourning and fidelity. I liked that. “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance,” says Ophelia in Hamlet. And her provenance from the Latin, ros marinus, dew of the sea. How can you not find rosemary romantic?

There’s no sea near Bengaluru, but rosemary, far from her Mediterranean origins, flourishes in her lonesome pot outside my window. My city is amazing that way. Despite its traffic- and dust-choked reputation, its lush, old ways continue in solitary gardens bursting with flowers and fragrance.

I used rosemary more liberally than ever for four months when I was at Berkeley, where to my astonishment and delight, she grew wild outside our home on the pavement. I never bought rosemary. I simply stepped out, plucked her out and carried her back. The memory of the freedom and abandon she grew with is always a contrast with her life in the little pot near my workstation, but she appears quite happy with the soil and life under the giant raintree sheltering her.

I tenderly carried two sprigs to the kitchen, but, really, there’s nothing tender about her. She’s no delicate darling. Unlike most other herbs, rosemary is said to actually improve with roasting and grilling, tasks at which I remember deploying her.

Rosemary is best with lamb in my experience, not so much with fish, and alright with chicken. Use the sprigs in an oven to let the aroma spread and settle. I was making lamb chops for the child, and so I tried, for the first time, pounding the tough needles with garlic and peppercorn. I used some smoked red chilli to give it a mild fire.

After they were seared and grilled, the chops were, to me, a work of romance, an ideal dinner for two, garnished with the long distances and far times that rosemary had travelled to grace our table. When this interpretation dawned on me, I figured my reunion with her was worth a column. And that, if you have got this far, is what you are reading, dear reader.

None of this was on my mind when I began the day though. I had to make lunch for my child, and I had only four chops as raw material. Only when I sat down to work and got her fragrance did I think of rosemary. I made the chops and left home. I called my 15-year-old and told her not to eat her lunch before she got a photo or two. Grumbling, she made herself some mashed potatoes, plated the chops and sent me the photograph that you see below.

Every romance has its pitfalls though, and my eloquence about rosemary did not impress my hard-boiled wife, who admittedly was responsible for moving the fragrant one near my window. “Soapy,” she said. “That’s the fragrance of rosemary.” I was incredulous. “It’s not just me, many people say rosemary is soapy.”

Well.

Me, I’d rather stay with the romance—Paul Simon’s interpretation of a cambric shirt, sparrow on snow-crested ground, a sickle of leather. “Remember me to one who lives there. She once was a true love of mine.”

ROSEMARY AND SMOKED CHILLI LAMB CHOPS

Serves 2

Ingredients

4 lamb chops

7 garlic cloves

30 peppercorns

1 tsp smoked chilli powder

2 sprigs rosemary

2 tbsp lemon juice

Salt to taste

2 tsp oil

Method

Pound the garlic and peppercorn with the needles of a sprig of rosemary with a pestle in a mortar. Rub this over the chops with salt, lemon juice and smoked chilli powder. Warm oil in a pan and sear the chops, about 2 minutes per side. Place in an oven-proof dish, with the other sprig of rosemary, cover with foil, preheat the oven to 150 degrees Celsius and grill for about 20-30 minutes until done, depending on whether you want them rare or medium. Serve with mashed potatoes.

Our Daily Bread is a column on easy, inventive cooking. Samar Halarnkar (@samar11) is the author of The Married Man’s Guide to Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures.