The scented kitchen
I began to cook with flowers during a particularly hot summer when my parents’ garden had a huge bush of English lavender, with the deepest, most piercing fragrance imaginable. I used to wonder how I could capture that scent in my cooking. Tarragon vinegar was much in vogue, so I infused a bottle of white wine vinegar with a bundle of lavender heads, and was thrilled at the way the colour and scent gradually released itself from the flowers into the vinegar. Lavender sugar, syrups and sorbets soon followed.
“The use of herbs is very much a matter of association, taste, and prejudice,” wrote Elizabeth David. I feel the same about the use of flowers in the kitchen. I do not expect everyone to like the flavour and scent of lavender as much as I do, but I hope that these recipes will inspire readers to develop recipes to their own taste.
Do not eat any plant or flower that you cannot identify just because it smells as if it would taste good, though. Even if you know a flower to be edible, such as a rose, do not use it for culinary purposes if you think it may have been sprayed with harmful substances, such as pesticides. Never cook with flowers you have bought, as these will almost certainly have been sprayed or otherwise treated with chemicals. Flowers found growing by the roadside will have been exposed to exhaust fumes, animal excrement and other waste, so they are best left where they are.
It is best to pick flowers on a dry day, and in the early part of the day, after the sun has evaporated the dew, but before it is hot enough to evaporate the essential oils. Choose fully open specimens, undamaged by insects or disease. Shake them to remove any tiny insects. Use your judgement as to whether or not the flowers should be rinsed. If so, do it quickly, in ice cold water, and lay them to dry on two or three layers of kitchen paper. Use them within a few hours of picking, but if you do need to store them for a day or two, surround them with damp, not wet, kitchen paper and seal them in an air-tight box in the refrigerator.
The recipes which follow can be adapted to other fragrant, edible flowers. For example, you can infuse rose petals, fennel flowers or clove pinks in white wine vinegar, or make flavoured sugars from a range of scented flowers.