Cooking With Leaves - NYTimes.com Aside from looking beautiful, your dinner can be wrapped in a green leaf for a number of reasons. This culinary technique protects food in a secure, impermeable package. Said leaf-wrapped food - meat or fish or savory mixture - may then be grilled, steamed or roasted. In the process, the leaves add a unique flavor and perfume to the dish. Banana leaves, large and bright green, are common and indispensable in tropical kitchens around the world. They also make beautiful place settings or plate liners, or even to-go containers. In this week's City Kitchen column, I write about using banana leaves to prepare Mexican-style seafood. But other cuisines call for cooking with other kinds of leaves. For example, grape leaves can be simmered to make dolmas or used to wrap a sardine destined for the grill. Large chard leaves are good for wrapping pâté or meatloaf. South Indian cooks make great use of taro leaves. In Oaxaca, fragrant hoja santa leaves and avocado leaves are used extensively. Lemon leaves wrap tiny meatballs in Sicily. Chinese cooks use bamboo leaves as the wrapping for joong (which look like pointy tamales and are filled with sticky rice). And anyone with a fig tree knows that the leaves add an incredible sweet fragrance to wild salmon or to baked cheeses like feta or chevre. In my recipe for Yucatán fish, a large fillet of grouper that's been marinated in a bright paste of achiote, orange and lime is wrapped in banana leaves before baking or grilling. You can use the same process for whole fish or fillets. Either way, there is no mistaking the banana leaf's chief virtue; it allows the fish to steam and keeps it moist, and it permeates it with a sweet aroma. Look for banana leaves in Latino or Asian markets, sold frozen if you can't find them in the produce section. They thaw instantly, so you can just use the amount you need and store the remainder in the freezer. Lengths of banana leaf should be passed briefly over the flames of a stovetop burner to make them more pliable and easier to work with. Wash in cool water, pat dry and cut with scissors to the desired size.