Our local farmer’s market is a brilliant display of ethnic diversity in food. There’s East Asian, West Asian, Middle Eastern, African, South American, Pacific Islander stalls. I can buy fresh bamboo shoots, banana flowers, yams, red eggplants, cassava, abika, kang kong.
It’s where I found fish mint, a little pot of it for a dollar, from someone who spoke so little English that all I got was that it was edible, good for you, tasty.
I’m not so sure about the tasty, though she was very enthusiastic about it. In Asian cooking it’s used in soups, stir fries, salads, but I haven’t yet found a recipe I really like. The leaves have a strong, fishy aroma. If you imagine vegan fish sauce, you’re getting close, but I’m not vegan and I prefer actual fish sauce. The roots taste a bit like coriander, but again, I’d prefer coriander, or Mexican cilantro. The little pot rapidly spread and at one stage I considered yanking the whole lot out. Then Covid hit.
Houttuynia cordata has been used in Chinese medicine for thousands of years. My neighbours knew what it was, and the problem of it spreading uncontrollably was quickly solved. In Chinese medicine it is thought of as having “cold” properties, which means it is used to treat “heat”, aka fevers, infections, viruses, inflammation. It is thought to target the lung, so things Western medicine would call flu, pneumonia, bronchitis. So no surprise, in the first covid outbreak, SARS-CoV-1 in 2003, fish mint was one of the first herbs researched as a treatment.
The research succeeded in identifying mechanisms of action that supported its reputation in Chinese medicine as an antiviral, and in particular as targeting specific parts of the SARS virus. There was one, small cohort study using combined Western medicine and Chinese herbal treatments, that found fish mint improved outcomes, but SARS was brought under control before widespread epidemiological studies could be done. But the research set the stage for SARS-CoV-2, or Covid. There have been phytocompounds identified in fish mint that inhibit covid and protect lungs from pulmonary fibrosis, and it has lots of compounds in it that have been shown in many studies to be anti-inflammatory and antiviral in general.
Covid is a serious disease and not one to muck around with, but if you do get it, there doesn’t seem to be a downside to making an Asian style noodle soup with ginger and garlic, lemon balm, Thai basil, coriander and fish mint. At the very least, it will tell you how your sense of taste is faring. Fish mint as also been investigated for its effect on various bird flu viruses in the lab, and as a treatment for people with severe H1N1 flu and found to be effective. And it could be useful for allergies by blocking the overproduction of mast cells.
Houttuynia cordata, family Saururaceae, Fish mint
Fish mint is not actually a mint, but it behaves like one. It’s a low growing, soft-stemmed herb that likes warm, wet, shady spots and spreads with underground rhizomes. If you give it the right (or you could say wrong) conditions, it will take off and spread like wildfire, and it has the potential to be invasive. Like mint, you might prefer to keep it confined to a large pot, and if you border Zone 5 wilderness especially creeks or wetlands, I’d keep an eye on it until you are sure it isn’t going to head bush.
It will grow (easily) from a cutting, so even if you manage to find some sold for eating in an Asian market, you are likely to be able to strike it. It’s native to large parts of eastern Asia, including parts of inner Mongolia where I expect it would get very cold, and down into Vietnam where I expect it would get quite hot.
Most of the references I found by following references from this link: “Houttuynia cordata Thunb: An Ethnopharmacological Review”: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2021.714694/full.
You will find the rest of this series by clicking the tag Medicinals.
