Edible Flower Garden
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About this ebook
Anyone who picks up The Edible Flower Garden will be tempted to grow, harvest, and sample at least a few of the more than forty varieties of edible flowers. Among them, you'll find more familiar food plants--dill and mustard, for example--in addition to common flowers, such as tulips or roses. Author Rosalind Creasy's stunning photography and detailed plans for an edible flower garden make this a must-have book for any flower gardener or home chef.
Come along with Creasy on a tour in colorful pictures and careful diagrams and descriptions of her own flower gardens. Included is a tour of the edible flower gardens of Alice Waters famed Chez Panisse restaurant.
Creasy catalogues each variety of flower and how to grow it, plus gives a myriad of delectable ideas on how to use the flower from candied violets and roses to decorate appetizers and cakes, to nasturtiums for a colorful shrimp salad, to day lily buds, pink clover and wild mustard flowers that are tossed together in a spectacular stir-fry.
Favorite Recipes Include:
- Flower Butters
- Candied Flowers
- Tulip and Endive Appetizer
- Pineapple Sage Salsa
- Rose Petal Syrup
- Lavender Ice Cream
- And many more…
Read more from Rosalind Creasy
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Book preview
Edible Flower Garden - Rosalind Creasy
the EDIBLE
FLOWER
GARDEN
Rosalind Creasy
First published in 1999 by Periplus Editions (HK ) Ltd.-, with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, Vermont 05759 USA and and 61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12, Singapore 534167.
Photographs and text copyright © 1999 Rosalind Creasy,.
except p 49 (top); Gudi Riter.
Illustrations by Marcie Hawthorne
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Creasy, Rosalind.
The edible flower garden / by Rosalind Creasy.—1st ed.
106 p. : ill. (some col.); 28 cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. )
ISBN: 978-1-4629-0617-8 (ebook)
1. Flower gardening. 2. Flowers. 3. Plants, Edible. 4. Cookery (Flowers) I. Title.
SB405.C765 1999
635.9—dc21
98036999
CIP
Distributed by:
NORTH AMERICA, LATIN AMERICA & EUROPE
Tuttle Publishing
364 Innovation Drive
North Clarendon, VT 05759-9436 U.S.A
Tel: 1 (802) 773-8930
Fax: 1 (802) 773-6993
info@tuttlepublishing.com
www.tuttlepublishing.com
ASIA-PACIFIC
Berkeley Books Pte. Ltd.
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Singapore 534167
Tel: (65) 6280-1330
Fax: (65) 6280-6290
inquiries@periplus.com.sg
www.periplus.com
JAPAN
Tuttle Publishing
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Tel: (81) 03 5437-0171
Fax: (81) 03 5437-0755
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First edition
12 11 10 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4
Design by Kathryn Sky-Peck
Printed in Singapore
contents
Edible Flower Gardens page 1
How To Grow Edible Flowers 10
My Edible Flower Gardens 16
Interview: Alice Waters 26
Encyclopedia of Edible Flowers page 29
From Anise Hyssop to Violets
Favorite Flower Recipes page 67
Flower Butters 70
Sweet Things 71
Candied Flowers 72
Edible Flower Canapes 74
Tulip and Endive Appetizer 75
Citrus Dip for Begonia Blossoms 76
Pineapple Sage Salsa 76
Ricotta-Stuffed Zuchinni Flowers 77
Sage Tempura 77
Flower Confetti Salad 78
Wild Violet Salad 79
Baby Shower Petal Salad 80
Mardi Gras Salad with Pecans 81
Poor Man's Pilaf 82
Stir-Fried Beef with Anise Hyssop 83
Grilled Swordfish with Rosemary 84
Rose Petal Syrup 86
Rose Petal Sorbet 87
Lavender Ice Cream 87
Tangelo and Kiwi Salad with Orange Blossoms 88
Scented Geranium, Creme Fraiche, and Strawberries 89
Tea Cake with Anise Hyssop and Lemon 90
Lavender Shortbreads 90
Appendices page 92
Appendix A: Planting and Maintenance 92
Appendix B: Pest and Disease Control 99
Resources 103
Acknowledgments 106
edible
flower
gardens
It's incredible how many flowers or parts of flowers I've eaten in the past few years—lavender petals made into ice cream, zucchini blossoms stuffed with ricotta cheese, roses used in butter, to name just a few. And I've made an effort to share the experience, serving unsuspecting guests unadorned pineapple guava petals and an Art Deco—style cake with candied pansies. Not only do I eat edible flowers, but I've become a missionary in promoting them!
I'd love to be able to tell you about the first flower I ever ate, but I can't remember what it was. It was probably a nasturtium, though, eaten nearly twenty years ago. I'm certain I started slowly, since to eat flowers seemed odd to me, maybe even taboo. I remember eating rice garnished with calendula petals in Vermont and thinking that they made the dish colorful but didn't add much to the flavor. Later I tried a few pansy petals served in a restaurant salad and still wasn't won over. It wasn't until I tasted lavender ice cream at an herb seminar that I became really enthusiastic. It was fantastic! I determined there and then to learn more about edible flowers.
Edible flowers can be tucked into almost any garden scene. Here (left), pansies, roses, and chrysanthemums grow in my back garden. A bouquet of edible flowers (above) includes calendulas, scarlet runner beans, lavender, nasturtiums, and chive blossoms. The photo spread on pages 2 and 3 shows a sunny border designed for a client. I interspersed the edible roses, nasturtiums, and marigolds among the nonedible lantanas and plumbagos. I used their blue and lavender blooms to tone down the fiery reds and oranges.
Since that time I've probably asked everyone I know to eat flowers. A few people just plunge right in with delight, as if I've given them permission to enjoy a new pleasure. But most people are much more hesitant. One friend would accept my dinner invitation only after warning, But I won't try any of your darn flowers!
You'd have thought I was offering her fried caterpillars. I've tried to get people to explain their hesitation about eating flowers, but they seem to have a hard time doing so. I certainly have difficulty explaining my initial reluctance. Why do others? Is it because we hesitate to try any new food? Somewhat. Is it a concern about the safety of eating them? Maybe. But I've just about concluded that, mainly, people believe that flowers are almost magical, so beautiful that only the eyes should feast on them. To those folks, eating flowers seems a bit greedy.
I've read everything I could find about edible flowers. I've asked every chef I've interviewed about his or her experiences with them. And I've tasted, tasted, and tasted every edible flower I could get my hands on, even stooping on occasion to sneak a bite of my hostess's centerpiece.
I've found the information available on edible flowers to be a strange hodgepodge. Much of our knowledge about edible flowers comes from old herbals. But when I turned to the herbals themselves, my confusion mounted. Eating flowers was commonplace in medieval Europe, when food often had a medicinal as well as a nutritional purpose. Sometimes the old recipes included dangerous flowers. Thus, a dish might call for two or three blossoms of foxglove, which is classified as poisonous today. True, we use foxglove to make digitalis, a heart stimulant, but only in carefully measured doses. I realized, as I read the old recipes, that the term poisonous is relative.
Displays of edible flowers (right) at farmer's market and exhibitions such as this one at the Tasting of Summer Produce in Oakland, California, get more sophisticated every year. On display are fuchsias, Johnny-jump-ups, tuberous begonias, nasturtiums, and rose petals. Flower petal confetti (far right) is a versatile little pleasure. Prior to serving, it can be sprinkled over an entree plate, a salad, or pastries.
As if the herbals' folk-medicine approach didn't make it difficult enough to determine which flowers are safe to eat, our forebears often called flowers by different names. For instance, what we know as calendula they called marigold; what we call cottage pink was gillyflower. So I was faced with the challenge of making sure the flowers referred to in the recipes matched the flowers we grow today.
And then which of the edible flowers are palatable? I collected a number of modern lists of edible flowers and cautiously began my taste testing. Some were absolutely horrible! Obviously, no one had tasted them before adding them to the lists. For example, some marigolds have a slightly lemony taste, others are tasteless, but the taste of most falls somewhere between skunk and quinine. Furthermore, none of these lists gave much guidance on how to eat the different kinds of flowers. I remember innocently putting an entire mullein petal into my mouth and finding it to be horribly astringent. I had the same experience with a carnation petal. Later I learned that you need to first remove the terrible-tasting white part at the base of the petals.
Flowers should become a permanent part of our cuisine. They offer another alternative to salt and sugar as seasonings. Not only do flowers make interesting seasonings, especially for those fruits and vegetables we want to increase in our diets, but their aesthetic value as decoration is obvious.
In researching this book, I asked every gardener, chef, and food expert I could talk to how they prepared edible flowers. And I arranged for a few edible flower gardens to be grown for this project: one by Carole Saville, an herb specialist in Los Angeles; another by the folks at the Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California; not to mention my own little edible flower gardens.
This harvest of edible flowers (left) is held by Judy Dornstroek. She and her husband grow edible flowers in their Pennsylvania greenhouse to sell to restaurants. Included are pink rose-scented geraniums, borage flowers, and nasturtiums of many colors. A harvest from my garden (below, top) includes broccoli and mustard blossoms, violas, violets, Johnny-jump-ups, the tiny mache flowers, calendulas, and nasturtiums. Edible flowers also can be used in bouquets. Here is a striking orange and blue bouquet from my garden (below, bottom) with lots of nasturtiums and the nonedible bachelor buttons.
If you're still hesitant about jumping in and growing an edible flower garden, I urge you to read along for inspiration. I bet that by the time you finish the cooking section, the sheer anticipation of working with flowers in your kitchen will have you planning your edible flower garden.
Edible flowers can be found in all sorts of landscape situations. Chestnut roses (left) grace a front yard in Jackson, Mississippi. Nasturtiums (above, top) cascade out of a planter and complement the Spanish architecture in a California garden. In New Jersey, many varieties of scented geraniums (above, bottom) line a walk at Well-Sweep Herb Farm.
how to grow edible flowers
All sorts of plants produce edible flowers, but it's the annual flowers—those that are seeded, grown, and produce all in just one season, like nasturtiums, pansies, and squash blossoms—that people are most familiar with. The easiest way