Thyme

Thyme grows wild across almost every dry Greek hillside, and its most valuable product is not the herb at all but the honey: bees working thymari through the summer produce the dark, resinous thyme honey that Greek cooks treat as a distinct ingredient rather than a generic sweetener. The plant itself is gathered, dried in bunches and kept alongside oregano, which it closely resembles in smell.

In the kitchen it sits a clear step behind oregano and is used in much the same way, dried and crumbled rather than fresh. It goes into the marinade for pork gyros alongside oregano and cumin, into the vinegar cure for Cretan apaki, and into slow pork and rabbit braises, but it is almost never the single herb a dish is built around.

Wild Greek thyme is often sold on the stem, and it is worth knowing that bunches gathered on the hillsides frequently contain savory as well, since the two plants grow together and smell similar enough that nobody separates them. Fresh thyme is fine in a braise but goes in early rather than late, and stripping the leaves from the woody stems first saves picking them out of the finished dish.