Sage
Salvia officinalis
S
ince sage, like rhubarb, comes from Siberia,
it is what I would call robust! Sow in late
spring, and allow it to grow for an entire season
without harvesting , as it needs to mature.
In the autumn, cut it back and cover well with
mulch. The next year it will burst forth with
great flavor. Every third year, simply divide it in
early spring.
Sage has a powerful almost overwhelming
aroma, and yet the leaves are actually quite
mild—milder and in the same flavor range as
rosemary. Because of this factor, the fresh leaves
are often added to a dish at the last moment, or
buried within vegetables, meats, or poultry to
be touched by its scent.
There is, for example, a great Italian veal
dish called saltimbocca that marries air-dried
ham (prosciutto) with fresh sage leaves and
uses thin slices of veal to encompass these fl a
vors like a sandwich. A truly wonderful exam
ple of the benefits that sage can bring
Perhaps the greatest, or most popular, use is
the dressing (or stuffing ) for poultry. For some
years now I’ve used a small onion and a small
orange—both stuck with four cloves holding
four sage leaves each—as a roasting seasoning,
put inside the bird in place of the dressing and
discarded before serving.
I make the dressing separately, using 2 cups
whole-grain bread (cubed) moistened with
¼ cup good chicken stock, 1 tablespoon
chopped fresh sage leaves, ¼ teaspoon fresh
thyme, ¼ teaspoon sea salt, ¼ cup dried cran
berries, and one diced Bosc pear. All of this
goes into a small loaf pan and is baked along
side the roasting bird for at least 40 minutes.
I do this because I’m nervous about the po
tential for blood to move into the stuffi ng and
potentially breed bacteria in its warm, moist
well-insulated center! (The onion and orange
are discarded but give a great flavor to the
bird.) Also, the dressing itself is much lower in
fat in that it doesn’t absorb it from the bird.
Now, all this is for carnivores, and this book
is 99.9 percent vegetable and fruit oriented, so
what to do? I make the dressing just described
with a vegetable stock and use it to stuff winter
squash. It can be placed in a halved acorn squash
or even a small delicata, covered with foil, and
baked with, obviously, no fear of fl esh contami
nation.
If you have a special reason to start your sage
bush from seed (such as a friend who has a par
ticularly aromatic variety unable to be found as
a starter), then you’ll have to do this on a sunny
windowsill (or greenhouse). Sage doesn’t germi
nate outdoors very well. It needs a soil tempera
ture of 55ºF–80ºF and takes 7–21 days to show
signs of life. If you start from seed, let the plant
develop without harvesting in the fi rst year.
278 • GROWING AT THE SPEED OF LIFE
