Last summer, when Piccolo Sogno chef Tony Priolo asked Michael Loran Hansel to locate an obscure Italian herb that he wanted to grow on the restaurant’s back patio, the landscaper was stumped.
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It’s not hard to see why. Even the few English-language sources that have any information about the herb aren’t all that clear about it. The Oxford Companion to Italian Food confuses the plant with some of its cousins in the Lamiaceae family, identifying it as common pennyroyal but acknowledging that “sorting out these various kinds of mint, which cross and hybridise easily, is a bit complicated, and on top of that, the Italian names vary from place to place.”
Eventually Hansel came across an article in the Los Angeles Times that briefly mentioned a grower who’d been given some mentuccia seeds by a customer and had begun cultivating the plant. Hansel called the guy, who at first wouldn’t sell him any. When he relented, he still refused to ship them, insisting that they be picked up in person. Last September Hansel was scheduled to do a job in San Francisco, so a friend met the grower in LA and flew north with four plants. Hansel bare rooted them, freeing them from their soil, then wrapped them in wet newspaper and flew them back home to Chicago. It was too late in the season to install them on Piccolo Sogno’s patio, so one was potted in the greenhouse west of Hebron where Hansel contracts with a grower. The others returned to the city with him. He kept one in a window, one in the yard, and one on his deck and started experimenting.
The plant Hansel was cooking with was the last of the three he brought home with him—he lost two when he moved to his present apartment. But wherever they are, they’re probably still growing. He didn’t water the third for three months over the winter when he was traveling abroad, and while the plant had essentially disappeared on his return, as soon as he resumed watering it, with spring around the corner, the plant shot up long tendrils with tiny leaves.
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