Miel de Fenouil (Fennel Honey), Les Ruchers de Normandie, Gisay-La-Coudre, France

I was traveling with my family this summer and visited Normandy, France. In Étretat I found a shop selling regional products with lots (and lots) of different kinds of honey. One caught my eye. Fennel honey. I'd never seen it before. And it had a sticker proclaiming that it was a silver medalist at the 2013 Ministry of Agriculture and Food's General Agricultural Competition. That was all I needed to make a beeline to the cash with it in my hot, little hands. Actually, it had me at Fennel. The 2013 prize was just icing.

Flowering fennel

So what is fennel? It is an aromatic, perennial herb indigenous to the Mediterranean region but now widely grown all over the world that has culinary and medicinal uses. However, some consider it an invasive weed since it propagates well by seed and can be found in open spaces like pastures and along the road. I think the plant is quite elegant with its feathery leaves and umbrella like flowers.

Fennel

If you are a licorice fan, you are probably already acquainted with it since it has a licorice flavor (like anise and star anise). I am a licorice fan. Not surprising it is a major ingredient of absinthe, a highly alcoholic beverage distilled from herbs. It is one of the herbs what gives absinthe its licorice taste (but not its psychoactive properties).


In addition, you can cook the bulb part of the fennel (great with salt, butter or cream) or eat it raw (great in salads). The leaves and seeds of the fennel plant are also used in cooking. If you've ever cooked Indian food, you may have noticed that fennel seeds were called for. Or, if you've ever eaten at an Indian or Chinese restaurant at the end of the meal roasted fennel seeds (sometimes sugar coated) might have been served as an after meal digestive or breath freshener.

Fennel is also purported to have a number of medicinal properties. It has been used to treat flatulence, airway inflammation, and colic, and it is thought to improve eyesight (some animal studies suggest it may be useful in treating glaucoma), and reduce hypertension. Of interest, Pline wrote about how fennel improved eyesight in the first century. Furthermore, powdered fennel has been used in kennels and stables as an anti-flea preparation.
 

In addition, the Greeks considered fennel a symbol of victory after their victory over the Persians at Marathon. The plain of Marathon was a field of fennel.

And, bees make honey from it in Gisay-La-Coudre in Normandy. One website suggests that fennel honey happened by accident. A apiarist from Marseille, Gerard Jourdan, regularly put his beehives on the plateau of Valensole to collect lavender honey. However one year the Ricard Society requested that local growers grow fennel on the plateau for the production of pastis. Bees on the plateau split their time between the fennel and lavender, and the resulting lavender/fennel honey was a slightly green honey with an unusual flavor. Given its mixed origins, it couldn't easily be sold in France. Therefore, the next year, Mr. Jourdan positioned his hives in the middle of the fennel fields to get a pure honey from just fennel. This began fennel honey production.

Florant and Melanie Maugeais of Les Ruchers de Normandie

Gisay-La-Coudre is a small community (population 244) in Haute-Normandie where apiarists Florent and Melanie Maugeais have 200 beehives. They are a young couple with agricultural roots, advanced studies in agricultural business and beekeeping, and pride in producing quality, organic honey.

The red dot in the NW corner of France, showing Gisay-La-Coudre

At Les Ruchers de Normandie, the Maugeais' label, they produce a number of different kinds of honey: acadia, linden, wildflower, and fennel, to name a few. 

The fennel honey that I have won the 2013 Silver Medal from the Ministry of Agriculture and Food's General Agricultural Competition.  This competition, which was created in 1870 and happens every year, is a big deal. Honey is judged in the Regional Products and Wine division. Producers are anonymous to judges and judges, who are regarded as experts in their fields, come from all over France to participate. Products, like honey, are obtained in the marketplace by anonymous buyers and then sent to the competition. It is the oldest competition of its kind in France and has many safeguards in place to minimize bias. Winners can label their products as medalists and have the glow that comes from knowing that their products are worthy.

The fennel honey is a deep amber color and slightly opaque. I thought it would be very thick because of the way it swirled in the jar but in fact it is a very thin honey and difficult to capture on a toothpick. It has no crystals or texture, just clear, thin honey. It has an extraordinary herbal, medicinal flavor with an undertone of molasses and a spicy aftertaste. I've heard it described as also having an almond, nutty flavor, but I think the herbal/spicy may overpower this.The aftertaste reminds me a bit of radish honey. It doesn't have any licorice taste at all. Quite lovely! Too strong for a delicate tea, too good to put in baking, but probably great on buttered toast or on crepes. Why it did not win Gold I'll never know. It is very unique.

You can buy this honey and other Les Ruchers de Normandie products on the Les Produits Normandie website. Well worth the bother!

 

Himalaya Honey, Rajpura, India (Punjab)

My friend Ben was deployed to Kuwait for a few months and brought me back this Himalaya honey that is produced by Apis India Ltd. He said he found it in a local supermarket. If the label is anything to go by, which is in English and Arabic, this Indian producer seems to have a strong presence in Middle Eastern markets.

Apis India Ltd honey Collection areas, from the Apis India, Ltd website

Apis India, Ltd has a lovely website. Their facilities and production standards are impressive! They produce a variety of honeys (rape, lychee, acacia, sunflower, eucalyptus, wild forest flower and Himalaya, to name a few) and have the capacity to process 100 tons of honey a day. They package in quantities of 25g to 300 kg. I'd like to see what 300 kgs of honey looks like (!) Even with these large quantities they pride themselves on upholding quality standards, with a laboratory in house and a strong quality assurance program. While they produce a lot of honey varieties, they state that they specialize in Himalaya honey.


I do not have a good spatial sense and this extends to being geographically challenged. I vaguely know where things are and know I should know where things are, but I don't always. Luckily I'm not proud and will happily look things up. The Himalayas, for instance. I know they are between India and Nepal but I was surprised to see how broad of a swath they cut across India. If you look at the map, the part of the Himalayas that my honey came from is on the bit just east of Pakistan.

Himalayas from the Himalayas Wiki site

The label says that the Himalaya honey I have is collected from "the floral sources of the vast range of the Himalayas in India," with all honey collected from flowers at a minimum height of 3000 ft. Looking online to see what kind of flowers grow in the Himalayas yields an embarrassment of riches. The better question might be, what doesn't grow in the Himalayas?! Well, to answer that you may need to peruse Adam Stainton's book Flowers of the Himalayas and at over 200 pages, it may take a while.

 In fact there is a valley, a national park called "Valley of Flowers" located in the province of Uttarkhand, India that covers 87 kilometers squared, that explodes with color between June and October. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004 and is a destination for people who want to combine hiking with an experience like no other. To get an idea of what it is like, read Trek to Valley of Flowers, a travel log by Thingnam Girija, N. Ulysses and Tabish, or peruse the many photos online of the area. In some cases the colors are so vivid it looks like they've been artificially colored.

Balsam in bloom from Trek to Valley of Flowers blog

The label of my honey does not give a clue as to what floral sources, if any, were major contributors to this honey and my guess is that with so many flowers intermingled with others,"wildflower mix" probably best describes it.

Himalaya honey, Apis India Ltd

It is a warm amber color, and quite thin with no particulate matter or crystals. It has good body and a flavor that builds. First it has a mellow sweetness with tones of molasses and then later menthol, finishing with a robust sweet last taste. It isn't what I expected. I thought it would be much lighter with more floral tones.  Overall, though, a good quality, somewhat complicated honey. Given its consistency it would be well suited for baking, on toast or in hot cereal. It may change the taste of a delicate tea too much, though. I'm not sure where you can get it, other than Kuwait. Given Apis India Ltd's large facility and distribution operation, it may be easier to find than you might think (and well worth it!).

Melkspruit Dairies Pure Honey, Ladybrand, South Africa

I was in Southern Africa for a short time recently and spent most of my time in Maseru, Lesotho. Maseru is on the boarder of South Africa. If you look at the map, Maseru is just south of the "E" in "Free State" across the border into Lesotho. For a change of pace, one Saturday I went to Ladybrand, a border town on the South African side for lunch (at Living Life- highly recommend it). A new acquaintance mentioned that the 'Milk store' near the Spar supermarket had fresh unpasteurized milk for sale. It is hard to get unpasteurized milk in the US because of milk regulations and I had never had unpasteurized milk, so on the way home I went to check it out.

Southern Africa

Countryside around Ladybrand, South Africa

The Milk Store is a store run by Melkspruit Dairies. As far as I can tell, Melkspruit Dairies is a farm near Teneriffe, in the Eastern Cape, a rural location on the border of Free State, where Ladybrand is. A search online suggests that Melkspruit is known for its elevation (4,380 feet above sea level), its periodic earthquakes, and its proclivity to drought.

In the store they have large, refrigerated stainless steel vats of milk. You can buy a plastic container, or bring your own, and fill it with fresh milk. I saw a few people come in with empty plastic liter soda bottles to fill. As soon as I was out of the store, I had a swig of my small plastic bottle. It is wonderful, creamy on the top, and oh so milky.  I can now see what all the fuss is about. It really is much more flavorful.

Southern African Landscape

Now apart from milk, cream, flavored milks, and cheese, they also have honey that they produce on the farm. It is called "Melkspruit Dairies Pure Honey." I get the feeling that South African diary farmers are a no-nonsense lot who call it like it is. I had been looking for locally produced honey and was having trouble finding any, so I was very happy to stumble on some in the milk store. The fellow manning the counter, a friendly fellow with a ready smile and a ruddy complexion, couldn't tell me much about it other than it was produced on the farm. From my limited experience of doing a few hikes and driving in the area, the terrain is mostly low brush and scrub with some herbs, grasses and eucalyptus. Crops are mostly maize and sorghum, but I did see a few sunflower fields.

The honey was runny when I first got it, but it has since crystallized, so it is a pretty fast crystallizer. It is now an opaque, deep yellow color with specks of pollen and other fragments in it. It resembles lemon curb but with a deeper yellow color, almost the color of egg yolks. It is now a solid mass of medium sized crystals with a slightly floral beginning taste, that is then overpowered by the fresh, spicy taste of menthol. The menthol is undoubtedly from a eucalyptus source. It is a very good, high quality, unprocessed honey.

Melkspruit Dairies Pure Honey

Sage Honey from Split, Croatia - a guest post by Elizabeth Gowing, author of 'The Little Book of Honey'

All the signs are that this is somewhere that I'll find excellent honey. I'm in Split, on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, for a spring holiday. The city is ancient, grown up around and within the crumbling palace of Roman Emperor Diocletian. It sits between mountains and sea - a great place for trade in foodstuffs.

Since becoming a beekeeper in Kosovo six years ago (you can read the story of my adventures in my book, Travels in Blood and Honey; becoming a beekeeper in Kosovo, published by Signal Books in 2011) I've become aware of the ways that landscapes produce distinctive honeys; that to lick at a honey is like sipping at a wine and tasting the land which gave it birth, the climate which nurtured it, the people and their technologies who produced it.

For two years I researched honeys from around the world for my second book, The Little Book of Honey (www.thelittlebookofhoney.co.uk) which includes tasting notes and the stories behind extraordinary honeys (ivy honey, avocado honey, the honey fighting poverty in Nigeria, the honey which helps excluded youth in inner-city London) as well as my favourite honey recipes from every continent (Russian sbiten honey drink, honey vinaigrette, Yemeni honey bread, honey ice-cream and more). So when, like Split in Croatia on this spring weekend, I come to a settlement that's new to me, I guide myself round the town on a hunt for honey.

Here it takes me to some great places - through the fish market, gleaming and glistening with the slippery and the scaly, and through the fruit and vegetable market where women sit at stalls offering small green bundles of fresh herbs and kitchen garden produce including samphire which I buy for the first time - perfect to eat with the fish. I'm getting closer now, surely. I see the flower market and know that a country with such profusion in its meadows, such fragile wild cyclamens held up in the enormous fists of the traders, will have wonderful honey.

Then there it is in front of me - a profusion of stalls selling honeys I've never heard of, along with some familiar delicious tastes. I see acacia and chestnut and lime flower, woodland honey and meadow honey. I've never tried sage honey before so I buy a pot of that, as well as a small phial of propolis to keep in my handbag for cuts and ulcers; nature's antiseptic.

When I get home, winding through the limestone streets, the arches and alleyways, with washing blooming by every window box, I sit down to savour the sage honey. It's a clear liquid honey, the colour of the wooden shutters at the windows of the houses here. The aroma is malty and musky, with a faint tang of medicine reminding of its herbal origins. The taste is quite different - caramel and orange blossom with an aftertaste that's almost mocha. Today I drizzle it in yoghurt though I think it would also be an excellent honey to use in baking.

I've tried the delicious Croatian pepper cookies, paprenjaci, and the recipe I've found online tells me they are traditionally made with honey. So maybe my next exploration of Croatia is to recreate my springtime trip in my kitchen back home using some of this extraordinary local sage honey.

Thaba Bosui honey, Lesotho, Southern Africa

I’m in Maseru, Lesotho for a few weeks doing a short term project and thought I’d take advantage of being in a new and wonderful place, and try to scout out some local honey. But before I get into that I want to give you a little background on Lesotho (or rather, The Kingdom of Lesotho). Most people that I talked to about my trip didn’t know where it was. To tell the truth, I had to pull out a map the first time I heard of it too.

Lesotho is a small, mountainous country completely surrounded by South Africa. If you look for South Africa on the map, you’ll see a circular country southeast of Johannesburg. That is Lesotho. If you pay attention to the markings on the map that show mountains you’ll see that Lesotho is just full of lots of mountains. The so-called “low lands” which border South Africa all around its edge are not very low at all, at about 1,000 to 1,600 meters above sea level. In fact, Lesotho is unique in that it is the only country entirely above 1,000 m, and is known as the ‘Kingdom in the Sky.’ Does it live up to being in the sky? 

You bet. 

Fascinating clouds at sunset in Maseru, Lesotho

I could do nothing but look at the sky all day while I’m here. It seems so close. I’ve never been to Montana (the big sky state) but I wonder if the sky there is as mesmerizing. In Lesotho the air is crisp and clear, the clouds take on the most unusual shapes from billowing puffs to sheets of feathery wisps- and they have such depth and expanse. Sunrises and sunsets are spectacular. The views from elevated spaces defy words. Magical does not begin to describe this place.

 However, before I arrived, given all the mountains on the map, I thought Lesotho would be like Switzerland, with needle sharp mountain ranges, and up and down and around driving on roads hugging the edges of cliffs. 

Sheets of clouds over a mountain at sunset in Maseru, Lesotho

Well, Switzerland without all the very cold, very snowy bits (although Lesotho does get snow in winter especially at the highest elevations) or lederhosen. I’ve since discovered that it isn’t like Switzerland at all. The mountains, at least in the low lands, seem old and weathered, with large flat plateaus on their tops, and they dot large valleys of flat lands where people grow maize, and sorghum (among other things).  For being so high up and having so many mountains there is A LOT of flat space. If you are in a valley looking at the mountains, they seem to come in ones and twos rather than as a range. However, I’ve not been in the interior, where the higher mountains are, so it may be different there.  

There are also A LOT of rivers (and dams) here, and water is an important export to South Africa. It is the end of summer, and there has been a drought for the last two years (although I hear from locals that this year has been much better for water). Many of the river beds are dry- and these are called dongas (not sure of the spelling). 

Puffy white clouds you can almost touch at Thaba Bosiu, Lesotho

These dry (or nearly dry) river beds carve deep cuts into the earth though, making it easy to imagine how much water they hold when the spring thaw comes.

But back to honey. It is my first time in sub-Saharan Africa and I was very excited to see what the local honey scene is. Imagine how disappointed I was when Me Zinnia, the owner of the house I’m staying at, told me that there is no local honey scene. Any honey produced, she said, is generally consumed by the family and not for sale, or is imported from South Africa. The Pick and Pay supermarket seemed to confirm this as they only have honey from South Africa (and seemingly mass produced at that). But I wondered if local honey was more likely to be sold in a local market than in a supermarket (hope springs eternal). I checked out the open market where small stalls sell everything from sandals to fruit and didn’t see any either. Not good. Not good at all. But just when I thought I’d cross the border into South Africa to get local (and not mass produced) South African honey (the next best thing to Lesotho honey), my luck changed.  

It changed as I was hiking Thaba Bosiu (the night mountain, so named because it seemed to grow in the night to those who tried to climb it then- at least that is one story; the other is that King Moshoeshoe and his people arrived at the flat mountaintop at night). 

Views from the plateau at Thaba Bosiu looking at the mountains in the interior.

But before I go on about the honey find I want to insert a little bit about Thaba Bosiu. It is spectacular and has an important place in Lesotho history. It can only be reached from a handful of passes that are easily defended (think rocky walking paths where you have to go one by one). On top there is a massive plateau where you have commanding views of all the valleys around it, and a natural spring feeds it. Moshoeshoe gathered his people on Thaba Bosiu and from this defensible mountaintop established relationships with chiefs throughout the country (mostly by marrying their daughters- 140 in total) thereby creating an extended political network, and ultimately uniting the country under one ruler, King Moshoeshoe I. 

View from Thaba Bosiu looking into the valley below.

This all happened in the 1820s. For more information, I recommend David Fleminger book “Lesotho Southbound Travel Guide.” On the hike you can drink water from the spring, visit King Moshoeshoe I (and II) graves (many Lesotho royalty are buried there), and see King Moshoeshoe I’s house. You can also be completely overwhelmed by the views. If you are near Maseru, it is a quick day trip to Thaba Bosiu and I highly recommend it.

But back to the honey. While I was hiking I noticed honey bees and asked our guide, a local man, about (what else) honey. He informed me that there was local honey production, in fact it was very local. 

Ntate Maccae's bee hives

After the hike he directed me to Ntate Maccae, an apiarist who was a stone’s throw away. After getting lost just a little and asking directions to Ntate Maccae’s house from a teenager looking after a small child (my friends and I speak next to no Sesotho and we were very lucky that she understood me), we found Ntate Maccae’s house and met his wife. Yes, they produced honey and yes, we could buy some. It came in a plastic honey jar with a yellow lid with no label. She said the two jars we bought were her last but her husband was out harvesting more and if we brought our own container they could fill it later on. I instantly thought of the 1 liter plastic bottle I had in my room… With luck we will make it back to Ntate Maccae’s before I leave for home.

The honey is a mellow, orange yellow color, clear in a small sample, but somewhat cloudy in the jar. It is a runny honey but medium runny- I could swirl some on a toothpick without too much effort. It has honey sweet first taste that is not complex, and then an herby, slightly medicinal taste (sweet not bitter) at the end. I liken it to a eucalyptus taste. 

Ntate Maccae's honey.

Very tasty and very different from other honeys I’ve had from Africa. My guess is that the floral sources are low growing shrubs and herbs (there are few trees in the area with the exception of some eucalyptus and a few others). On the hike I noticed a flowering herb (yellow flowers) that resembled sage to me but the leaves were much smaller- perhaps it was one of the sources.

I’m afraid you won’t be able to get this honey online or at the store. You’ll just have to come to Lesotho to pick some up. Directions to Ntate Maccae’s can be obtained from the guide at the visitor center of Thaba Bosui. What other excuse do you need to visit the Kingdom in the sky?