A taste for tarragon

Most herbs defy easy description. Trying to discuss the flavor of thyme or oregano leads only to vague adjectives. Calling rosemary "woody" doesn't quite cut it.

But tarragon is easy. Tarragon tastes sort of like licorice.

It does not taste entirely like licorice; if it did, people would just put licorice in their food and that would be gross. But tarragon is certainly reminiscent of it, in a mild way.

This is not to say that tarragon itself is mild. It is quite strong; a little goes a long way. But when that little bit is applied to the right dishes, the result can be divine.

Most frequently, it is used as a bright punctuation to chicken, both in its later form (chicken) and its early one (eggs). Snip a few tarragon leaves over scrambled eggs and you have instantly elevated your breakfast. Mix a bit into chicken salad or egg salad and you have turned lunch from ordinary to grand.

Tarragon is also used frequently to bring out the best in seafood. A little tarragon added to shrimp, olive oil, shallots and garlic makes an outstanding topping for pasta. Most fin fish, too, benefit by being lightly blessed with tarragon.

And what about the other white meat? Pork is paired less frequently with tarragon, but the herb is an excellent complement to it. And you can even find respectable recipes for tarragon sauces to be served with big-flavored beef, though you won't find them here. What you will find here are two recipes for chicken, one for pork and one for salmon.

The first comes from the Trellis restaurant in Williamsburg, Va., a grilled chicken dish with Dijon mustard and tarragon. Here is how easy it is: You take a chicken and coat it with a mixture of mustard, wine and tarragon. You wait 24 hours. Then you grill it.

It is easily among the best grilled chicken you will ever have. It is certainly among the best grilled chicken I have ever had. And the genius of the recipe is you don't even have to grill it. It makes a great baked chicken or pan-sautéed chicken. Or you could do what I did and combine each of these methods. I put the chicken on a hot, cast-iron grill pan to get some of the flavor of a grill, flipped it over and then finished it off in the oven.

It was outstanding.

The other favorite chicken-and-tarragon recipe comes from Turkey. What makes it so outstanding is that the flavors all get trapped in bulgur, which adds a nutty taste of its own.

Also, there is a lot of butter. The butter helps. The butter also gets trapped in the bulgur. Yum. There, it also mixes with onions, tomatoes, green peppers and chicken stock. As I said, yum.

For a dish with fish, I went the salmon-with-mayonnaise route. A dollop of mayonnaise mixed with herbs is a delicious way to add elegance to poached salmon, and tarragon goes with mayonnaise the way peanut butter goes with jelly.

Then, I found an additional element online that, frankly, I would not have thought to do. I did not poach the salmon in water, stock or wine, or any combination of them. I poached it in beer.

As it turns out, salmon and beer go together like, well, tarragon and mayonnaise. And the creaminess of the tarragon mayo makes a perfect foil for the flavor of the beer.

The tarragon is also part of the sauce for the pork dish, Pork Chops With Mushroom-Tarragon Sauce. Mushrooms, tarragon and wine make up one of those classic gravies that can be paired with any number of dishes.

In this case, we did it with pork chops. The mildness of the meaty chops really allowed the flavor of the tarragon to come through. And also the flavors of the mushrooms and wine.