Mediterranean and southwest Asia; like dill, it
has fibrous leaf stalks but feathery, tender
leaves. There is one species of fennel,
Foeniculum vulgare, and it comes in three
different forms. The wild subspecies,
piperitum, is sometimes collected from the
countryside in southern Italy and Sicily,
where it’s known as carosella and valued for
its sharpness in meat and fish cooking.
(Fennel now grows wild throughout central
California as well.) The cultivated subspecies
vulgare is known as sweet fennel thanks to its
far richer content of the phenolic compound
anethole, which is 13 times sweeter than table
sugar, and also gives the characteristic sweet
aroma of anise. And a specialized variety of
sweet fennel, var. azoricum, develops the
enlarged leaf-stalk bases of bulb or Florence
fennel, which is used as an aromatic
vegetable.
Lovage Lovage (Levisticum officinale) is a