Most for your money cookbook

From these two examples we see that it's safe to take our mints as we find them, and to remember, too, that the Greek honey of Mount Hymattus, famous for thousands of years and still imported to our shores by fancy grocers, got its reputation from the bees feeding on thyme flowers, just as the celebrated honey of Dalmatia owes its reputation to sage flowers. But we can get domestic mintfed honey for the same price as ordinary clover honey, and it's tops! The carrot and mint families come together in the classic herb bouquet called bouquet garni in France and "a faggot of herbs" in England. This consists of either parsley or chervil, to represent the carrot family, tied in a tiny nosegay with just one leaf of bay and a sprig of some mint, such as thyme, sage, savory or spearmint. Let it be marjoram or savory for consommes, stuffings and stews, and basil for turtle soup and ragouts. Green herbs make the best cooking bouquets and chives or tarragon pinch-hit for either parsley or thyme; and it's well to remember, when using dried herbs, that a little goes a long way. Another indispensable combination is fines herbes, which originally consisted of minced parsley and finely chopped chives. But in trailing French chefs around the world it's undergone many a sea change, so today the green specks that peek out at you from an omelette aux fines herbes, or other dish with as Frenchy a name, may be cress, basil, rosemary, thyme, savory — almost any of the herbs that belong to the sweet carrot or parsley family. Chervil is extra good in fines herbes because it tastes of parsley and fennel combined. So is minced cress, watercress or peppergrass. Fines herbes destined to be mixed with melted butter to make a sauce for grilled steak, needs tarragon along with the chives, and sometimes mushrooms. Indeed, there's no hard-and-fast rule about any of this; so just be guided by good horse taste and whatever seasoning there is at hand. We'd like to do culinary justice to some of the pot-herbs — purslane, for instance, more intimately known as pigweed, which the French get piggish about when a double handful is tossed into a chicken broth enriched with egg yolk, butter and cream, together with an equal amount of sorrel, the sour grass that all Frenchmen go for, both cooked and raw. You can bring back plenty of both for nothing from a trip to the country. Then there's good old burdock, a humble weed if ever there was one, yet it offers very fine fleshy food stalks free for folks to peel and cook like asparagus, or cut up raw into salad, which is a far better use for this burr-breeder than just to let it grow up into burrs that get into your socks and hair. Even the stinging nettle is an herb which cooks into a swell mess of greens. Corn salad, too, and its tiny twin brother peppergrass are other old-timers, but they're staging a come-back; they're listed now in almost any seed catalog, together with eloquent recommendations for their use in soups, salads and such, and shouldn't be hard to find in any big market. Chickweed, as well, is just as good food for man as for his canary.