Salad Burnet: The Cucumber-Scented Herb of Salads and Frankfurt Green Sauce

Crush a leaf of salad burnet and you’d swear you were holding cucumber. It’s the leaf of Sanguisorba minor, a low, hardy perennial in the rose family with small, toothed leaflets, and it belongs in salads and cold drinks. It’s also one of the seven herbs in Frankfurt’s green sauce, and Thomas Jefferson planted it in his gardens many times.

At a glance

What salad burnet is

Kew accepts Sanguisorba minor as the species name and treats the Linnaean name Poterium sanguisorba as a synonym. Some gardening references still use the older name. It’s a perennial of the temperate biome.

Where it comes from

Salad burnet is native from Europe to the Mediterranean and the western Himalaya. Great Britain and Ireland are on the list, along with much of continental Europe, North Africa, Turkey, Iran and Central Asia. China isn’t on Kew’s native list, and the plant is recorded as introduced in Korea.

Salad burnet has been introduced widely in North America, South America, Australia and New Zealand, including dozens of US states and Canadian provinces. Mount Vernon’s plant notes record that Thomas Jefferson planted salad burnet in his gardens many times, starting in 1778.¹

Flavor and aroma

Crush a leaf and it smells like cucumber, and it tastes that way too. It’s fresh and green with a faint nutty, slightly astringent finish, and the youngest leaves are the mildest. We didn’t find any analysis of what compounds give it that cucumber note.

How salad burnet is used

• Salads and cold dishes. Mount Vernon says the leaves go into salads, soups and cold drinks, and that burnet can stand in for mint in many recipes.¹
• Frankfurt green sauce. The seven traditional herbs of Frankfurt’s Grüne Soße are parsley, chervil, chives, cress, sorrel, burnet and borage. See borage, sorrel and German spices.
• Fines herbes. Burnet is among the herbs used in the French mix fines herbes, built around parsley, chives, tarragon and chervil. See fines herbes.

Use the leaves raw or stir them in at the very end of cooking. Burnet also goes well with basil or cilantro in a dressing or dip, though that’s a home-cooking habit, not a sourced tradition.

Growing and buying

Salad burnet is a perennial. Pick the young leaves often and it’ll keep putting out new growth. We didn’t find any published storage figures for the cut leaves.

Safety and health claims

Kew’s economic botany records list medicinal, environmental and food uses for the plant, without detail.² We found no regulator assessment, recall or safety warning for salad burnet, and no NCCIH summary.

Plenty of claims about salad burnet get repeated online, and we couldn’t trace them to any source we could open: that it’s a great source of vitamin C; that it has useful amounts of tannic and gallic acid, quercetin and kaempferol; that it works as a diuretic for urinary problems or as an anti-inflammatory for arthritis; that the ancient Greeks and traditional Chinese medicine used it; that wine steeped with burnet was taken against the plague; and that soldiers in the American Revolution drank burnet tea to keep from bleeding to death. We don’t claim it treats or prevents anything.

Substitutes and comparisons

Borage is the closest match for that cucumber note. Peeled cucumber itself works where texture doesn’t matter. Related pages:

• Borage
• Fines herbes and fines herbes substitutes
• Chervil, chives and parsley
• Mint, which Mount Vernon suggests burnet can replace¹
• List of herbs and spices