When I interviewed Karin Maassen for April’s article she told me that they were making their garden a food garden for the bees and for themselves. I began to think about all the flowers in the garden which I eat.
I am first and foremost a food writer – I have been writing recipes since the early 90s. I have always plundered the garden for flavour and colour. Some of the flowers I use in the kitchen are grown in the potager (ornamental kitchen garden) expressly for that purpose. The edges of the carrés (rectangular beds) are sometimes fringed with calendula, nasturtium and borage. Other years I just leave self-seeded plants where they are. Sometimes these plants are dotted through the borders or in pots on the terrace.
The potager also provides flowers to eat from crops which have gone over – rocket or radish flowers – or other herbs like horseradish, chives, thyme, oregano, basil, coriander, mint and fennel. Courgette flowers can be picked to stuff and fry in batter. The lavender which billows down the drive is not harvested for pot pourri but to make vinegars and scented sugars for the pantry. Its sharp floral notes team brilliantly with musky flavours like beetroot and blueberries, give top notes in a salad dressing with strawberries, cucumber and avocado and provide contrast in buttery crumbly shortbread.
The hedgerows in April are full of the froth of elderflowers – sureau in French. You can harvest them to steep for cordial and “champagne” or lemonade. Or make fritters with the laciest of batters made from egg white and cornflour. I grow a pink elder in the garden with very dark, dissected leaves – Sambucus nigra ‘Black Lace’ – and the colour transfers through the steeping process.
Later, in May, acacia blossoms can be used in the same way. By the end of the month, Filipendula (meadowsweet) lifts its flowers like ostrich plumes. You can grow it in the garden or harvest it along the field edges. It makes a glorious cordial, rich and heady, and Lionel and Laurence, chef/owners at Racine, now Racinette in Lectoure, use it to delicious effect instead of cassis in a kir.
Saffron gazpachoSarah Beattie
You can grow your own saffron in the garden. Now, in France, there are some 20 departments where saffron is grown as a cash crop giving an annual yield of around 30kg. This is insignificant compared to the tonnes which were produced after introduction from Spain in the 14th Century. You can buy 20 bulbs for €20 from La Safranière des Cévennes for planting in July to September.
You won’t be able to harvest until the following autumn after the saffron crocus’s purple flowers have appeared. They will need a well-drained sunny position in good soil. In the meantime you can use the dried or fresh petals of calendula to sprinkle into gazpacho or onto potato salad. They won’t have the extraordinary explosive colouring power of saffron – which is why it commands such a high price – but they will add flavour and colour. I am very fond of C. Indian Prince and was relieved to find various online French seed stockists after Brexit stopped Higgledy Garden being able to send them.
Known as topinambour in France, the Jerusalem artichoke is a form of sunflower, Helianthus tuberosus. Their name has nothing to do with a Middle Eastern city but is a corruption of girasol, another way of saying tournesol. I grow them as much for their bright yellow daisy flowers as their fat tubers. I dig each clump up in November every year and replant a couple of tubers. Left alone they can quickly spread and become invasive. The tubers can be eaten raw in salads, boiled, mashed, puréed, roasted and fried. They can be pickled. I love a purée stirred through a creamy risotto, with sticky balsamic vinegar-poached slices of artichoke sitting on top.
Not all roses are useful in the kitchenSarah Beattie
If you grow scented roses and don’t spray them, now is the time to make the most of your bounty. Not all roses are useful in the kitchen – nibble your way around the garden and use your nose. You can dry petals and tiny buds of fragrant roses for use in the winter. Don’t steep petals expecting rosewater – that intensely perfumed essence is only obtained from the distillation of huge quantities of petals. Buy that and team it with your own petals to make the gorgeous Persian stew, Khoresht-e Hulu, fragrant with roses and other spices and lush with rich peaches – perfect summer food.
Rose petals mixed with soft cream cheese and sweetened raspberries can fill crisp barquettes of flan pastry. Use rose petals in salads, as decoration on cakes, stirred through fluffy, buttery rice and rose vodka (made in just four days, like you would sloe gin). Warm some honey with rose petals, chopped pistachios and dribble it over a cœur à la crème for a simple but elegant pudding. Don’t forget rose hips too are edible and packed with vitamin C. In World War Two and after, rosehip syrup was given to children to keep them healthy. R. rugosa is not only excellent to eat but has large hips too.
Whatever time of the year, you can have edible flowers from the garden. Violas and pansies are pretty fresh or dried in the winter, tulips and lilacs in the spring, a host of summer flowers and chrysanthemums in the autumn. Don’t use florists’ flowers unless you are very sure they’ve had no sprays or treatments – a very good reason to grow your own.
