Bay leaf

Cineole sits over allium sweetness and stops a long braise going cloying.

Resin and camphor, tied with string. The bouquet garni is two ideas, not five.

Two hours of simmering and it is still there. Almost no other leaf is.

Infused warm, strained out. The reason a good béchamel tastes of something.

Long braise, heavy fat, one camphor note running underneath all of it.

Bay is faintly medicinal and so is the berry skin. Cook them together.

Boil the leaf with them; the eucalyptol goes into the water and then the flesh.

Acid strips fat, bay keeps a long tomato sauce from tasting one-dimensional.

Pulses absorb aroma over an hour. Bay is built for exactly that timescale.

Earthy, muddy starch given a cool eucalyptus lift it cannot generate itself.

One leaf in the pot water perfumes the whole pan without announcing itself.

Camphor cuts a fat that acid alone can only partly handle.

Eucalyptol keeps a long braise smelling like a forest, not a fat rendering.

In the poaching liquor only. Restrained aromatics or none.

One leaf in the cavity. Any more and the sweetness disappears.

Eucalyptus over sludge. Two leaves, and pull them before serving.

The confit crock always has one. Its eucalyptol keeps the fat from reading flat.

Bay is cineole, juniper is pinene. Two resins, not one. Infuse the spirit cold.

Steeped in custard, it tastes faintly of almond and nobody can name it.

Peel and bay in the same braise: two bitters, one warm and one cold.

Drop a leaf in the jam pot; eucalyptol gives the sourness a savoury spine.

Poach the fruit with a leaf in the syrup; the camphor stops it going flat-sweet.

Tannic skin and cineole share a drying quality that sugar sits neatly between.

Both are long-infusion aromatics. Bay adds a cold edge vanilla never has.