Anethum graveolens, the dill of Europe and West Asia; and its South Asian cultivated race Anethum sowa, Indian dill, ranked by the more cautious authorities as A. graveolens subsp. sowa, which is coarser, markedly higher in dillapiole, and is a different herb on the plate
Origin: The eastern Mediterranean and south-western Asia, with the Levantine coast, Anatolia, and the Iranian plateau all within the native range. <em>Anethum sowa</em> belongs to the Indian subcontinent and is the reason this entry carries two origins rather than one.
Dill is one plant that yields two spices, and confusing them is the commonest mistake made with it.
Dill weed is the feathery leaf. It is delicate, grassy, faintly aniseed, and almost entirely volatile, which is why it is added at the end of cooking or not cooked at all. Boil it and the aroma leaves with the steam within a minute or two. Dried dill weed is a pale shadow of the fresh and is one of the few herbs where freezing is markedly better than drying: chopped into ice-cube trays with a little water, it keeps most of what matters.
Dill seed is the ripe fruit, flat and oval with a pale wing around the edge, and it is a different proposition altogether: stronger, warmer, faintly bitter, and closely related in flavour to caraway. It survives heat, which the leaf does not, so it belongs in brines, in rye bread, and in the tempering pan. Between the two sits the third form the Nordic countries insist on, krondill or crown dill, the whole flowering umbel cut just as the seed sets and thrown entire into a crayfish pot or a pickling jar, carrying leaf, flower, and green seed at once.
The chemistry explains the family resemblances. The dominant compound in dill seed is carvone, which is also the dominant compound in caraway, and that is why the two are so often mistaken for one another. Carvone is also the textbook case of a molecule whose mirror image smells entirely different: the form in dill and caraway is one enantiomer, and the form in spearmint is the other. The leaf smells of something else again, chiefly α-phellandrene and a compound named simply dill ether, which is what gives fresh dill the green, slightly citrus edge that the seed lacks.
The plant itself asks for very little. It is an annual, it bolts readily in heat, and it self-seeds so freely that a Russian or Polish garden that once grew it tends to go on growing it whether or not anybody sows again.
Dill barely had to travel across most of the range where it is now essential, because it was already native to it. The eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, and the Iranian plateau are all within its wild distribution, which is why Greek, Turkish, Levantine, and Persian cooking each arrived at heavy dill use without needing to borrow it from anyone.
The written trail starts early. Dill is named in Mesopotamian medical texts, has been recovered from Egyptian tombs and from Neolithic lake dwellings in Switzerland, and appears in Greek as ánēthon. That Greek word is worth pausing on, because it caused a famous confusion: the passage in Matthew where the Pharisees tithe the smallest garden herbs uses ánēthon, which is dill, and the King James translators rendered it as anise. Four centuries of English readers learnt the verse with the wrong plant in it, and the atlas records the same story from the other side under Anise.
Rome took the herb, used it freely, and then, in one of the odder reversals in this atlas, more or less gave it up. Pliny and Apicius both treat dill as ordinary, Roman sites across the empire yield the seed, and the legions carried it north into Gaul, Germany, and Britain. Yet modern Italian cooking barely uses it at all, and the Mediterranean line that runs through France and Spain is scarcely more enthusiastic. Dill went north and east from Rome and stayed there.
Where it stayed, it became structural rather than decorative. The Slavic world took it furthest: Russian ukrop goes onto very nearly everything, to the point of national self-parody, and Poland and Ukraine are not far behind. Scandinavia built its summer table on it, from cured salmon to the crayfish pot. Persia made it a rice herb and a soup herb in quantities that would alarm a French cook. And Ashkenazi emigration out of the Pale of Settlement carried the dill barrel across the Atlantic, where it became the New York kosher dill pickle and, on the appetising counter, the fronds scattered over smoked salmon.
A separate strand runs in India, where Anethum sowa is grown as its own crop and cooked as a green vegetable rather than as a garnish.
Dill divides the world into two camps with unusual sharpness. From Poland to the Urals, up through the Baltic into Scandinavia, and across Anatolia, the Caucasus, and Iran, it is one of the two or three herbs a kitchen cannot function without. In Italy, Spain, and most of France it is close to absent. Very few herbs are quite so unevenly distributed, and the line between the two zones falls roughly where the Roman Empire's northern and eastern frontiers once ran.
The Russian relationship is the extreme case and is a running joke inside the culture itself. Ukrop is scattered over soup, potatoes, fish, eggs, salad, and pickles as a matter of course, often without being listed as an ingredient at all, and the visual signature of a Russian plate is a green fleck of it somewhere. Ukraine and Poland use it nearly as freely.
The practical rules follow from the volatility. Fresh dill goes in at the very end, off the heat or as the dish leaves the pan; anything else wastes it. Stalks are worth keeping, because they hold flavour and can go into a stock or a brine where the fronds would disintegrate. Dill seed is the opposite and wants heat and time, so it belongs in a pickling brine, in rye bread, and in an Indian tempering. Dried dill weed is a poor substitute for fresh and should be treated as a different and lesser ingredient rather than a swap.
One long-running domestic use sits just outside the kitchen. Dill water was the original gripe water: an infusion of dill seed given to infants for colic, sold commercially in Britain from the middle of the nineteenth century and still on chemists' shelves in some form. The soothing reputation is old enough that it may lie behind the English name itself.
Indian dill, Anethum sowa, deserves its own note. It is coarser and more camphoraceous than the European plant, higher in dillapiole, and it is cooked as a leaf vegetable in its own right in Gujarat and Maharashtra rather than sprinkled over something else. Substituting one for the other gives a noticeably different dish.
Historical Journey of Dill
The Levantine Coast & the Eastern Mediterranean — c. 3000 BCE
Dill is native to a wide band of country running from the Levantine coast through Anatolia and across to the Iranian plateau, and that breadth is the first thing to understand about it. Greek, Turkish, Levantine, and Persian cooking each arrived at heavy dill use without borrowing it from anybody, because in every one of those places the plant was already growing.
The archaeological record is early and scattered. Dill seed turns up in Neolithic lake settlements in Switzerland, in Egyptian tombs, and across the Near East, and it is named in Mesopotamian medical texts. None of that indicates domestication in the sense that wheat or the olive were domesticated; dill is an annual that self-seeds so freely it hardly needs a farmer, and much of what was used was almost certainly gathered rather than sown.
The Levantine kitchen still uses it as a green herb by the handful rather than as a garnish. Rummaniyya, the Gazan dish of lentils and aubergine soured with pomegranate and finished with a great deal of chopped dill, is a fair example of the register: the herb goes in raw at the end, in quantity, and it is one of the two or three things that make the dish taste of where it comes from.
Everything else on this map runs out from this arc, in two directions that scarcely met again: west into Greece and Rome, and east into Persia and beyond.
Babylon & Mesopotamia — c. 2000 BCE
Mesopotamia gives us the oldest written pairing in this entry, and it is the one that has proved most durable: dill and the cucumber.
Dill is named in Akkadian medical and household texts, and the region's habit of preserving vegetables in brine and vinegar is older than any of the cuisines that later claimed the pickle as their own. What was worked out here is a piece of practical chemistry that has not been improved on since. Dill seed holds its aroma in a cold brine over weeks where a leaf herb would collapse; garlic and the seed together suppress spoilage; and the resulting sour cucumber keeps through a season in which nothing fresh is available.
Every pickle in this journey descends from that arrangement. The Polish ogórki kiszone, the Russian malosolnye ogurtsy, and the New York kosher dill are all, in their essentials, the Mesopotamian jar with a different alphabet on the label.
It is also the point at which the two forms of the plant part company. The brine wants the seed and the stalk, which survive it. The fronds are for the plate, and they go in at the last moment or not at all.
Athens, the Aegean & Classical Greece — c. 400 BCE
Greece named the herb and then caused four hundred years of confusion in English with the name.
Ánēthon is the classical Greek word, and it passed into Latin as anethum and from there into French aneth, Italian aneto, and Spanish eneldo. Modern Greek still says ánithos, almost unchanged. The trouble came when the King James translators reached the verse in Matthew where the Pharisees are described tithing the smallest herbs of the garden. The Greek is ánēthon and it means dill; they rendered it anise, and the mistranslation has outlived every correction since. The atlas records the same episode from the other side under Anise.
What Greece does with the herb is a matter of quantity. Dill is not a finishing touch in Greek cooking but a bulk green, used by the bunch and weighed in tens of grams. It is one of the two herbs, with mint, that define the Aegean vegetable repertoire: through the rice and spinach of spanakórizo, the greens and feta of a spanakópita, the yoghurt and cucumber of tzatzíki, the braised peas of arakás laderós, and, most plainly of all, maroulosaláta, in which shredded cos, spring onion, and an entire bunch of dill are dressed with oil and lemon and are the whole dish.
The Greek habit passed intact into Byzantium and from Byzantium into the Ottoman kitchen, which is the route by which dill reached the Balkans and the Slavic north.
Rome & the Roman Frontier — c. 50 CE
Rome is the strangest point on this map, because Rome used dill freely, carried it across a continent, and then let it go.
The Roman evidence is unambiguous. Pliny discusses anethum at length, Apicius calls for it in sauces and in preserved vegetables, and dill seed is recovered from Roman military and civilian sites from the Rhine to northern Britain, which is the signature of an army that took its kitchen garden with it. Roman gardeners planted it wherever they settled, and the monastic gardens that inherited the Roman repertoire kept it going through the medieval centuries in Germany, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia.
And then Italy stopped. Modern Italian cooking uses almost no dill at all, and neither does most of France or Spain. Basil, parsley, oregano, and rosemary took the ground, and the herb that Apicius treated as ordinary is now so rare in an Italian kitchen that its absence is a reliable way to tell Italian cooking from Greek at a glance, despite the two sharing so much else.
This point therefore carries no dish, and it should not. It is a transit: the route by which dill reached the European north, and the place that then declined to keep it. What Rome sent northwards took root permanently, which is why Scandinavia is downstream of here and Italy is not.
Isfahan & Shiraz, Persia — c. 500 CE
Persia uses more dill, by weight, in a single dish than most European cuisines use in a month, and it uses it in a way nobody else does: as a rice herb.
Shevid goes into the polo by the bunch. The rice is parboiled, drained, and then layered back into the pot with fistfuls of chopped herb between the layers, steamed under a cloth until the grains separate and a crust of tahdig forms at the bottom, and what comes out is green-flecked all through rather than garnished on top. Shevid baghali polo, dill rice with broad beans, is the classic and is the standard accompaniment to lamb shank; polo ba na'nā does the same with mint and dill together.
The soups take it in similar quantity. Āsh, the thick herb-and-pulse soups that anchor the Iranian winter, are built on chopped greens measured in hundreds of grams, and dill is usually amongst the largest of them. Āsh-e māsh and āsh-e shalgham both belong to that family. So does the northern Gilani habit of cooking broad beans down with dill, garlic, and egg into bāghālā ghātogh, a dish in which dill is not a seasoning but one of the two principal ingredients.
And the yoghurts take it raw. Māst-o-khiār, yoghurt with cucumber, dill, mint, walnut, and rose petal, is on every Iranian table and is the direct cousin of Greek tzatzíki and Turkish cacık, three versions of one idea arrived at across a range in which the herb grows wild.
Gujarat & the Deccan, India — c. 600 CE
India grows a different dill, and cooks it as a vegetable rather than as a herb.
The plant travelled east with everything else that moved along the roads between the Iranian plateau and the subcontinent, and then it changed. Anethum sowa has no wild ancestor of its own: there is no Indian progenitor distinct from A. graveolens, and no archaeobotanical evidence of a separate domestication. What there is instead is a cultivated race that diverged under long cultivation in a wholly different climate, far enough that the more cautious authorities rank it as the subspecies A. graveolens subsp. sowa whilst others give it species standing. The disagreement is genuine rather than pedantic, and this entry follows the conservative reading: Indian dill is a divergence, not a second beginning.
The divergence is chemical and it is large enough to matter at the stove. Indian dill is coarser in the leaf, markedly higher in dillapiole, and lower in the carvone that gives European dill its familiar sweetness, which leaves it with a camphoraceous, faintly medicinal edge. It also holds together: where A. graveolens collapses to nothing in a hot pan, A. sowa will take twenty minutes of stewing. That single property is what allowed the subcontinent to treat it as a leaf vegetable when every other tradition on this map treats dill as a finishing herb.
So Gujarat and Maharashtra cook it down in quantity, in the same register as spinach or fenugreek greens. Suva ni bhaji is the Gujarati version, dill stewed with split pigeon peas and tempered with mustard seed and asafoetida; shepuchi bhaji is the Marathi equivalent, and Bengal calls the plant shulpha. It is a winter crop, sold by the bundle with the roots still attached, and it is cooked the day it is bought because it wilts within hours.
The seed has a separate life again, going into the tempering pan and into Ayurvedic preparations for the digestion, which is the same property that made dill water a European nursery remedy.
Chang'an & the Tang Silk Road Terminus, China — c. 700 CE
Dill came east along the Silk Road with the Persian and Sogdian merchants who supplied the Tang capital, and it arrived carrying its West Asian name rather than a Chinese one. The Tang materia medica lists it as 蒔蘿 (shíluó), a transcription of the Persian shibit, and files it amongst the imported drugs of the western regions, prescribed for the stomach and the cold humours in much the same terms Dioscorides had used five centuries earlier.
It never took hold in the kitchen. The place a warm, sweet, anise-scented umbellifer might have occupied in Chinese cooking was already filled by 茴香 (huíxiāng), fennel, which the Chinese had long grown and which goes into everything from dumpling fillings to the five-spice blend. Dill stayed in the pharmacy, an imported curiosity with a foreign name, and Chinese cooking developed without it.
The pattern is Rome's exactly. A great civilisation received the herb, wrote it down carefully, passed it onward to the regions that would make something of it, and kept nothing for itself. What Rome sent north into the Baltic and the Nordic countries, Tang China and its successors sent south, down the old road into the Red River delta, where dill found a fish kitchen ready for it.
Tbilisi & the South Caucasus — c. 1000 CE
Georgian cooking is built on herbs used in quantities that startle visitors, and dill is one of the four or five that appear in almost everything.
The Georgian habit is to treat fresh herbs as a vegetable course in themselves. A plate of coriander, tarragon, dill, and spring onion is set on the table alongside the food rather than cooked into it, and the same herbs then go into the dishes by the handful. Chakapuli, the spring stew of lamb with green plums and white wine, is essentially a herb dish with meat in it, and dill sits in it alongside tarragon. Tqemali, the sour plum sauce that Georgians put on everything from potatoes to grilled meat, takes dill, coriander, and pennyroyal.
Dried dill is also one of the constituents of khmeli suneli, the Georgian dry spice blend, which is unusual: dill is a herb that dries badly, and its presence in a stored blend is a compromise the Caucasus makes and most dill-using cuisines do not.
The Caucasus is also the hinge between the Persian and the Slavic dill worlds. It sits on the route between them, it shares the Persian taste for herb-heavy stews and the Russian taste for dill on everything, and Georgian dishes travelled north into the Russian repertoire during the imperial and Soviet periods carrying the herb with them.
Hanoi & the Red River Delta, Đại Việt — c. 1400 CE
Dill is the one European-looking herb in the Vietnamese kitchen, and where it is used says how it got there. Thì là belongs to the north: to the Red River delta, to Hanoi, and to the river and coastal fish cookery of Tonkin. It thins out through the central provinces and is very nearly absent from the kitchens of Huế and the Mekong. Had it come with the French, who governed the whole country for three generations, it would be in Saigon too. That it stops roughly where Chinese cultural influence stopped points instead to the long overland connection with the north, reinforced during the Ming occupation of Đại Việt between 1407 and 1427, and to an arrival many centuries older than the colonial period.
What the delta did with it has no parallel anywhere else on this journey. Every other tradition treats dill as a finishing herb, measured in spoonfuls. Northern Vietnam cooks it by the armful, in hot fat, alongside an equal weight of spring onion, and treats the pair as a single ingredient. The combination is the signature of the region's fish cookery and it recurs across the whole repertoire: in bún cá, the fish noodle soup of the delta, in canh cá, and above all in chả cá.
Chả cá Lã Vọng is the dish that made the reputation, and it is precise about its own history in a way few street dishes are. The Doãn family began serving it from a house on Hàng Sơn in the Hanoi Old Quarter around 1871; the street was subsequently renamed Chả Cá after the dish, which is a rare honour for any plate of food. River catfish is marinated in turmeric, galangal, and fermented rice, grilled over charcoal, and then brought to the table in a pan of hot oil into which a whole bunch of dill is pressed and left to collapse for barely a minute.
Constantinople & the Ottoman Empire — c. 1450 CE
The Ottoman kitchen inherited the Greek and Byzantine use of dill wholesale and then spread it across an empire that reached from the Balkans to the Levant, which is the single most important act of transmission in this entry.
Turkish calls it dereotu, the stream herb, for the damp ground it prefers. It belongs above all to two families of dish. The first is the dolma and sarma: vine leaves, peppers, courgettes, and onions stuffed with rice, currants, pine nuts, mint, and a great deal of dill, eaten cold in olive oil. The second is the zeytinyağlı, the olive-oil vegetables served at room temperature, where dill is scattered over braised celeriac, okra, or beans at the last moment.
Rice takes it too: iç pilav, the rich stuffing pilaf of liver, currants, and pine nuts, is finished with chopped dill, and so is the yoghurt drink and the cucumber cacık that shadows Greek tzatzíki across the Aegean.
What matters for the rest of this map is the reach. Ottoman rule carried the dill habit north-west into Bulgaria and the Balkans, where it fused with an existing Slavic taste for it, and north-east across the Black Sea into the Ukrainian steppe. Nearly every dill-heavy cuisine between Athens and Moscow received or reinforced the habit through this point.
Sofia & Plovdiv, Bulgaria — c. 1480 CE
Bulgaria sits where the Ottoman and the Slavic dill worlds meet, and it takes generously from both.
The defining pairing here is dill with yoghurt, and Bulgaria has a particular claim on the yoghurt. Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus, the organism that gives Bulgarian yoghurt its character, was identified and named from Bulgarian soured milk in 1905, and the country's dairy culture is correspondingly serious. Against that thick sour yoghurt, dill is the herb that works: cold, green, and sharp enough to lift it.
Tarator is the summer form, a cold soup of yoghurt thinned with water and ice, with cucumber, crushed walnut, garlic, oil, and dill in quantity, eaten in the heat and drunk as much as spooned. Snezhanka, named for Snow White, is the same set of ingredients with the yoghurt strained thick and the water left out, served as a meze rather than a soup. The two are the same idea at two consistencies, and Bulgarians will tell you which is which with some firmness.
Dill also runs through the Bulgarian pickle jar, through the bean stews, and over the grilled meats, and the Balkan habit extends outward into Romanian, Serbian, and Macedonian cooking on much the same terms.
Kyiv & the Ukrainian Steppe — c. 1500 CE
Ukraine is where dill stops being a herb and becomes an assumption.
The black earth of the steppe grows it without effort, it self-seeds through kitchen gardens from one year to the next, and it appears on the table with a consistency that no western European cuisine approaches. It goes onto boiled potatoes, into sour cream, over salo, through the pickle barrel, and into very nearly every soup.
Borscht is the case that matters. The soup is a beetroot broth of considerable depth, long-simmered, sweet and sour at once, and it is finished at the table with sour cream and a scattering of raw dill that is not optional and is not decorative. The herb supplies the green top note that a slow-cooked root soup otherwise lacks entirely, and a borscht served without it tastes flat in a way that is immediately obvious once you have had it with. Ukrainian borscht was inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding in 2022.
From the Ukrainian lands the habit ran north and west into Poland and north-east into Russia, and it is through the Ukrainian and Polish territories of the Pale of Settlement that the dill barrel eventually reached New York.
Warsaw & Kraków, Poland — c. 1550 CE
Poland calls it koper, and uses it with a directness that makes it one of the two or three flavours a Pole abroad misses first.
Three preparations carry it. Zupa koperkowa is the plainest and the most revealing: a light chicken or vegetable broth, potatoes, soured cream, and an entire large bunch of dill stirred in off the heat, and nothing else at all. It is a soup that consists of dill, and it demonstrates the herb's limits and its virtues at once, since it is very good made properly and tastes of hot cream and nothing when the dill is added too early.
Mizeria is the cold counterpart: cucumber sliced tissue-thin, salted and drained, dressed with soured cream, vinegar or lemon, and dill. The name is generally said to come from the Latin for wretchedness, supposedly because Queen Bona Sforza wept for Italy when she ate it, which is a good story of the kind that is usually invented afterwards.
And then the barrel. Ogórki kiszone are cucumbers lacto-fermented in salt brine with garlic, horseradish leaf, and whole dill heads, and they are a household staple rather than a shop product. The soup made from them, zupa ogórkowa, is one of the standard Polish first courses. Between the fresh herb and the fermented jar, dill is present in a Polish kitchen essentially all year.
Moscow & the Volga, Russia — c. 1600 CE
No culture on earth eats as much dill as Russia, and Russians know it, and joke about it, and go on doing it.
Ukrop is not a seasoning in Russian cooking so much as a default condition. It goes onto boiled potatoes, into soups of every kind, over fried eggs, through salads, into the brine barrel, onto fish, and into sour cream, and it is added so automatically that recipes frequently do not bother to list it. The standing joke, told by Russians against themselves, is that a Russian cook confronted with a dish that already contains dill will add more dill.
The pickle barrel is the most serious use. Malosolnye ogurtsy, lightly salted cucumbers, are brined for a matter of days rather than months with garlic, horseradish, blackcurrant leaf, and whole flowering dill heads, and they are eaten while still half fresh and squeaking against the teeth. The same treatment goes onto watermelon in the lower Volga, which produces one of the more surprising preserves in Europe.
The soups take it raw at the table: shchi, the cabbage soup that is the oldest dish in the repertoire, and okroshka, the cold soup of chopped vegetables and boiled egg flooded with kvass or sour milk, which is dill-heavy to the point of being a herb dish. And olivier, the mayonnaise salad that is compulsory at a Russian New Year, takes its sharpness from dill pickles chopped through it.
It is from the Russian and Ukrainian lands of the Pale of Settlement that the whole apparatus, barrel, brine, garlic, and dill head, crossed the Atlantic.
Stockholm & Skåne, Sweden — c. 1650 CE
Scandinavia received dill from the Roman and monastic garden tradition that ran north through Germany, and then built its entire summer table on it.
The Nordic countries use a form of the plant that other cuisines mostly ignore. Krondill, crown dill, is the whole flowering umbel cut at the moment the seed begins to set, carrying leaf, flower, and green seed at once, and it is thrown entire into the pot. That is what makes a Swedish crayfish boil what it is: the kräftskiva in August is a party built around freshwater crayfish simmered with an extravagant quantity of crown dill, eaten cold with schnapps, paper hats, and singing, and the broth ends up tasting as much of dill as of shellfish.
Curing is the other pillar. Gravlax is salmon buried in salt, sugar, and dill for two days under a weight, the name recording an older method in which the fish was fermented in a pit above the tideline, and the herb is packed against the flesh in handfuls rather than sprinkled. It is served with hovmästarsås, the sweet mustard sauce that is itself a third dill by volume.
Beyond those two, dill runs through the season. Dillkött is lamb or veal poached and served in a dill sauce sharpened with vinegar and sugar, a dish of considerable age and a fixture of the Swedish home table. New potatoes at Midsummer are boiled with dill stalks and finished with butter and more of it. And the herb goes into the pickled herrings, the crayfish, and the gravlax that between them make up a Nordic summer.
Helsinki & the Finnish Lakes — c. 1700 CE
Finland took the Swedish dill habit across the Gulf of Bothnia and applied it to a landscape with rather more fresh water in it.
The country has something in the order of a hundred and eighty thousand lakes, and the fish that come out of them, along with the salmon of the Baltic and the northern rivers, are the centre of the summer table. Lohikeitto is the dish that results: a soup of salmon, potato, and leek in a broth enriched with cream, finished with an enormous quantity of chopped dill and a knob of butter, and eaten with rye bread. It is a plain soup and the herb is what makes it, going in raw at the very end so that the aroma survives.
Dill is equally fixed to the Finnish new potato, boiled with the stalks and served with butter at Midsummer, and to the crayfish, which Finland takes as seriously as Sweden does and cooks in the same crown-dill broth. Pickled herring, gravad salmon, and the summer salad of cucumber and soured cream all take it.
What is worth noticing is how far north the habit runs. Dill is a Mediterranean annual with no business at sixty degrees of latitude, and yet the Nordic countries have made it the defining herb of a season that lasts three months, growing it fast in a short, intensely lit summer and preserving what they cannot use.
The Lower East Side, New York — c. 1900 CE
The dill barrel crossed the Atlantic with Ashkenazi Jewish emigration out of the Pale of Settlement, and it arrived in New York essentially unchanged.
Between 1880 and 1920 some two million Jews left the Russian and Polish territories of the empire, and a great many of them landed on the Lower East Side. What they brought to Essex and Hester Streets was a preserving tradition rather than a recipe: cucumbers in salt brine with garlic and whole dill heads, fermented in open wooden barrels on the pavement, sold by the piece from the barrel and graded by how long they had been in it. A new pickle is bright green and still crunching; a half-sour has gone a few weeks; a full-sour is olive-drab, soft, and sharply lactic. The vocabulary is a New York invention describing a Russian process.
The city's other dill fixture came from the same community by a different door. The appetising shops sold cured and smoked fish, and the plate they produced, split bagel, cream cheese, lox, red onion, tomato, and a scattering of dill, has become one of the most recognisable food images the United States has exported.
America then industrialised the pickle and put it beside a hamburger, and the word dill now means, to a great many English speakers, a particular sourness in a jar rather than a green herb at all. That is a curious end for a plant whose leaf is the part most of the rest of this map cares about.
