Thyme herb

Farigoule is the name that the inhabitants of Provence have given to the thymus vulgaris, which is considered and valued as the king of all the kitchen herbs. There is no other aromatic herb which combines so readily with such a large variety of foods. On the one hand, thyme can lend a very piquant flavor to sausages and ham, and on the other, endow figs or plums with an exotic, refined taste. Medically it has a beneficial effect on the stomach, bladder and lungs. Its most charming effect, however, must be that on the girls of Provence, who used to know themselves loved by a young man when they found a bouquet of thyme on their doorsteps.

Thyme is very much at home in the whole of the Mediterranean area, although it flourishes nearly everywhere. Its mild, almost sweet flavor, was already appreciated by the ancient Greeks. By the Middle Ages, at the latest, it was lending a delicious flavor to Anglo-Saxon stews and German roasts, and pervading their meat stuffing and thin soups. It is cultivated in rows and grows in low globular bushes. Its pale red flowers are open from the end of April through June. In spring the soil between the rows is turned over and the weeds removed by hand. Once the harvesting is taking place, it is too late to separate the "chaff from the wheat", the weeds from the the provence herbs.

It is only since the beginning of the eighties that the cultivation of thyme has acquired significance, when two farmers in Drôme invented a harvesting machine. The harvest is brought into the drying chambers in the form of a ten cubic yard, five foot thick mattress of herbs weighing about two tons. Warm air is blown through the herbs from below and, once dried, the leaves are removed, sorted, packed and dispatched.