Seasoning: From Herbs to Experience

A season. A measure of time and experience. What is the special ingredient in seasoning? To season, without breaking open a dictionary, seems to mean bringing flavor to life, drawing on previous moments or experiences that were worthwhile from the past and using them now for a new reason. By thinking aloud here, I hope to gain an insight into such a seasoned word by considering different uses of this quiet yet powerful word.

Add seasoning to your salad. Seems true enough. A salad without the right ingredients is bland and missing something. So we season it with herbs and spices to give it a lively flavor. But, that's not enough to describe the full use of this word. There's more to it.

The four seasons seem to be a key worth note. Each season lasts three months. Time is a definite factor in the word "season." In fact, each instance that uses season in whichever form (season, seasoning, seasoned, etc.) indicates time. If any one factor dictates one's quality, then it's time, the use of time, the kind of time spent. Other seasons span the calendar: the baseball season, the basketball season, any sporting season. All of those seasons vary in time, but the mere use of the word does indicate an extended period of calendar time.

Also, dragging my mind through this linguistic bog are seasoned writers and seasoned cast-iron frying pans. Seasoned writers have written a lot of words. A seasoned pan has fried a lot of food, especially cast iron pans that are often wiped dry with a paper towel rather than washed with soap and water, then dried. I was a little put off the first time my wife suggested we leave the cast iron pan on the stove over night so it could become seasoned!

That leads me to wonder if the whole use of "seasoning'' with herbs and spices suggests a sort of time period that they must dry and age before they are potent enough to be used in cooking. Is that it? So, to add seasoning to your favorite dish, thereby spicing it up, means something to the effect of bringing aged ingredients into your food that have weathered some time out of the earth and have dried into well-flavored herbs and spices, making a dish taste more flavorful.