Lemon Balm: Flavor, Citral, Kitchen Uses and What the Evidence Says

Rub a fresh lemon balm leaf and it smells clearly of lemon, with none of the fruit’s sourness. It’s Melissa officinalis, a perennial mint-family herb, and cooks tear it into salads and use it in soups, sauces, stuffings and drinks. Its flavor is gentle and fades fast with heat, and it’s best raw or barely warmed. Herbal medicine uses it for mild stress and sleep, on the strength of tradition, not clinical proof.¹

At a glance

What lemon balm is

Lemon balm is a perennial of the temperate zone, native from the Mediterranean to Central Asia. It’s spread far beyond that range. Kew lists it across much of Europe, in South America, New Zealand and Tasmania, and in more than 30 US states and several Canadian provinces. Kew recognizes two subspecies, M. officinalis subsp. officinalis and subsp. inodora.⁵

Not the same as lemon verbena

People mix the two up because of their names and their scent, but they’re in different families. Lemon balm is in the Lamiaceae. Lemon verbena, Aloysia citrodora, is a South American shrub in the Verbenaceae. See lemon verbena and lemon balm vs. lemon verbena.

Flavor and aroma

Fresh lemon balm smells clearly of lemon, with a soft, green, faintly minty background and none of the fruit’s sourness. The flavor is gentle and fades fast with heat or drying. Here’s the chemistry behind it.

The compounds

The leaf holds very little oil. The European Medicines Agency’s assessment puts the essential oil at 0.06–0.8% of the leaf, made up mainly of monoterpene aldehydes: citral, neral and citronellal. Citral is itself a mix of two isomers, geranial and neral, the same pair that gives lemongrass its smell. The same EMA report puts β-caryophyllene and germacrene D at about 10% each of the oil.²

Figures from individual analyses vary, so here they are with their scope:

The Algerian figures describe one distilled oil, not the leaf you buy, so don’t read them as typical.

The European Pharmacopoeia also sets a quality marker for the dried leaf that has nothing to do with scent: at least 1% rosmarinic acid.²

Origin and history

Pliny the Elder wrote that if you rub beehives with melissophyllum, the bees will never desert them.⁷ In the 19th-century Bostock and Riley translation, a note on a related passage identifies a plant of that name as Melissa officinalis, or balm.⁸ We read that as Pliny describing a bee plant his later translators matched to balm, not proof that he meant the modern species.

The EMA notes that lemon balm leaf has a long, well-documented tradition of medicinal use in Europe.² Plenty of specific stories about the herb couldn’t be traced to a source we could open, so we’ve left them out: a first record in 300 BCE, Moors bringing it to Spain, Dioscorides and Avicenna on its medical uses, the Carmelite nuns’ “Carmelite water”, its use as a church strewing herb or furniture polish, and Thomas Jefferson growing it.

How lemon balm is used

Lemon balm goes into salads, soups, sauces, stuffings, liqueurs, wine, herbal teas and fruit drinks. It’s also used to give fragrance to wine, tea and beer. Its essential oil also turns up in aromatherapy and as a scent in perfume and cosmetics.

In the kitchen, lemon balm is best raw or barely warmed. Tear it into salads and fruit, steep it in hot water for tea, infuse it into syrups and custards, or stir it into a sauce at the last minute. Long cooking leaves little of its scent behind.

You’ll find a few cuisine-specific uses online, including lemon balm in Indian curries, with Dutch pickled eel, and as an ingredient in Chartreuse. We couldn’t trace any of them to a source we could open.

Buying and quality

Fresh lemon balm should be bright green and smell strongly of lemon when you rub a leaf. Limp or browning leaves have lost a lot of that. We couldn’t find a grading standard for culinary lemon balm beyond the pharmacopoeia marker above.

Storage

We couldn’t find a published shelf-life figure for fresh or dried lemon balm from a regulator or extension service. Smell is the practical test: rub or crush a little, and if the lemon scent is faint, it’s faded.

Health and safety

What the EU regulator says about medicinal use. The European Medicines Agency’s herbal committee accepts lemon balm leaf as a traditional herbal medicine for relief of mild symptoms of stress, to aid sleep, and for mild digestive complaints like bloating and wind.¹ That status rests on long-standing use, not clinical proof. The EMA says one small study on anxiety and sleep showed a possible improvement, but flaws in its design ruled out firm conclusions.¹ Its assessment concludes there isn’t enough information to establish that it works.² It also judged studies on attention and memory to be of questionable relevance, partly because they used an extract its monograph doesn’t cover.²

Cautions in the EMA assessment.²¹

• Lemon balm medicines are for adults and children over 12.
• They may cause drowsiness, and the risk may go up with alcohol or other sedatives.
• Lab findings suggest an effect on thyroid-stimulating hormone; the clinical relevance isn’t known.
• Use in pregnancy and breastfeeding isn’t recommended, for lack of data.
• At the time of assessment, no side effects had been reported for these medicines.

Food use. FDA lists lemon balm among spices and among essential oils generally recognized as safe for their intended use.³⁴ In the EU, dried herbs and herbal infusions of lemon balm are both capped at 400 µg/kg of pyrrolizidine alkaloids, plant toxins that can contaminate harvests.⁹

We don’t claim lemon balm treats or prevents anything. Claims that it fights cancer, relieves infant colic or is a rich source of vitamin C couldn’t be traced to a source that supports them.

Substitutes and comparisons

Lemon verbena gives a stronger lemon scent, and lemongrass a grassier one. A little lemon zest with fresh mint gets close in a salad. See lemon balm substitutes.

• Lemon balm vs. lemon verbena
• Lemon balm vs. lemongrass
• Lemon balm vs. mint
• Profiles: lemongrass, lemon verbena, lemon thyme, mint