Bay Leaves - Whole

Bay is the least showy thing in this range and one of the hardest to do without. Nobody eats a dish and says it tastes of bay. Leave it out of a stock and something is flat in a way that is difficult to name. It works underneath other flavours rather than beside them, which makes it easy to undervalue and easy to forget to buy.

The leaf comes from Laurus nobilis, the Mediterranean laurel - a dense evergreen tree that grows all around the basin, including in Egypt. Dried leaves are stiff, matte olive-green, and snap rather than bend. Crush one and the smell is resinous and cool, a little like eucalyptus, with something floral and faintly bitter behind it. That cool note is eucalyptol, the same compound that gives rosemary and cardamom part of their character.

What makes bay unusual is that it needs time and liquid. Most spices give up their flavour in a hot pan in under a minute. Bay gives up almost nothing that way. Its compounds are drawn out slowly by simmering, which is why it belongs in stock, soup, braises, beans, tomato sauce and rice, and why it does very little in a quick stir-fry. Twenty minutes is the point at which it starts to matter; an hour is better.

In Egyptian cooking bay goes into the stock for meat, into fattah, into kawari and other long-simmered dishes, and into the pot when boiling meat to be used elsewhere. Around the Mediterranean it is in bouquet garni with thyme and parsley, in ragu, in bean dishes, in pickling brine and in the poaching liquid for fish. It also has a long association with the ingredients cupboard for a different reason: whole leaves are traditionally tucked into containers of flour, rice and pulses.

The practical rules are short. One or two leaves for a family-sized pot. Add them early so they have time to work. Take them out before serving, because a dried bay leaf stays stiff and sharp-edged no matter how long it cooks and is genuinely unpleasant to bite. And do not crumble them into a dish you cannot strain, for the same reason.

Quality is visible here more than with most spices. Good dried bay is still greenish and snaps cleanly; old bay has faded towards grey-brown, has lost most of its scent, and is close to useless - it is the classic jar that sits in a cupboard for five years and contributes nothing. Crush a leaf between your fingers before you use it. If it does not smell of anything, it will not taste of anything either.

The leaf carries more cultural weight than any other in this range. The laurel wreath was the Greek and Roman mark of victory, worn by champions and by poets, and the word laureate still carries it. It was sacred to Apollo, and the priestess at Delphi is described in ancient sources as chewing laurel before prophesying. Very few kitchen ingredients have that kind of history attached to them.

Bay is also traditionally added to warm drinks in cold weather in parts of the Mediterranean, and that is described here as a custom rather than as a health claim, and it is not medical advice.