For Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d write about one of my favourite romantic foods—basil, also known as bacia-nicola or kiss me Nicholas in Italian. Like most herbs, basil’s lore is mixed, being associated with both love and hate, but for today, let’s focus on love. What I like about basil is not that it will make a woman love you, as sage is supposed to do (if you thread the leaves onto the woman’s hair and bury it under her doorstep), or that it is an aphrodisiac, as saffron is said to be. What I like is that it is said to “attract husbands to wives”. Isn’t that nice?

Now let it be said that there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that basil attracts husbands to their wives. The two main aromatic chemicals in basil are methyl chavicol, and eugenol. Methyl chavicol is produced commercially for use in perfumes, flavourings and herbal supplements, and apparently doesn’t attract anything. Eugenol is also used in perfumes and flavourings, and also as an antiseptic and anaesthetic, particularly in dentistry. The only things eugenol is known to attract are male orchid bees (who use the chemical to make pheromones), and female cucumber beetles.

Alas, there is no scientific evidence that feeding my husband pesto will attract him to me. But I can’t help believing there is just a little truth in basil lore. After all, they say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. If I feed my husband a delicious meal full of basil (and what meal full of basil wouldn’t be delicious?), it stands to reason he might be attracted to me.

So I’ll go all out with the basil today, because it can’t hurt, right?