Nouvelle Parsley : Edible Flowers:It’s hard for a blossom to get respect in the food world.

Gertrude Stein ate flowers (gal-pal Alice Toklas would toss a salad of nasturtiums, chervil, oil and lemon juice for her). Ike made a famous vegetable soup with nasturtiums. Queen Victoria liked tea, syrup, honey and jelly made from violets. Proust soaked a madeleine in lime-blossom tea and unfurled 2,000 pages worth of memories. And Smokey Robinson ate a pansy on “Hollywood Squares.”

These days you can find flowers in four-ounce packages at local supermarkets, right next to the chervil.

But most people still think eating flowers is weird. Pansies are the nouvelle parsley.

“We still get customers who don’t believe our blossoms are edible,” says Pam North, who with her husband, Jay, runs Paradise Farms, a boutique farm in Carpenteria that has supplied a good portion of the nation’s edible flowers since 1986. “They ask us ‘Aren’t those things poisonous?’ ”

North is patient with the uninitiated. “I usually remind them that they’ve been eating flowers all their life--cauliflower and broccoli are flowers, after all.”

Even some trained chefs who know better are anti-flower. Patina’s Joachim Splichal sums up the feelings of a lot of chefs: “Flowers are fine for the table, they’re fine for the ladies, but not for my food.”

Admittedly, the idea of munching on violets or carnations does seem, well, silly. Even those who regularly cook with them complain that flowers are all looks and no substance.

“Maybe it’s just me,” says Ken Frank, chef/owner of La Toque in West Hollywood, “but I’ve never seen a whole plateful of flowers that I’ve wanted to eat. They’re very beautiful, but I’ve yet to find one that you really want to make a dish out of.”

Still, Frank, who once made a sorbet from fresh violets and Chateau d’Yquem for Baron Phillipe de Rothschild, vividly remembers the first time he cooked with flowers: “It was 1979, and I was still at Michael’s (in Santa Monica). I used a julienne of rose petals as a garnish for my best lobster dish, which is made with candied turnips and Pernod. It was just gorgeous, I mean there’s not any food that can get that pretty bright red color . . . of course, what I really like to use in that dish is truffles, but they’re not always in season.”

“It’s true that most flowers don’t have much taste,” North says. “That’s why we mostly limit ourselves to those with some flavor.” The Norths grow about 30 different varieties, including flowering basil, lavender and chive.

Nasturtium seems to be the fresh flower most commonly used these days. Its strong, peppery taste reminds some of watercress. Borage is also popular. “It tastes like a cucumber with a little grain of sugar on it,” Frank says. He likes to freeze borage blossoms in ice cubes for parties. Pansies don’t have much taste, but they come in so many different colors and have such a soft, velvety texture that they’re in demand anyway.

Despite the widespread use of edible blossoms in California cuisine, the full possibilities of flower cooking have yet to be explored among contemporary cooks. Flower tarts were all the rage during Britain’s Tudor and Stuart eras, for instance, but they’ve yet to make an impact at, say, Spago.

But it is possible to go too far with edible flowers. Consider the Peppermill Hotel and Casino in Reno, Nevada, where marigolds, borage and other blossoms garnish hippopotamus T-bone steaks. And one California art writer was shocked when a curator she was having lunch with reached for the table centerpiece and started snacking on petals. “Don’t worry,” he told her, “this isn’t just a bouquet, it’s food.” (For more on edible flowers, see Flower Cookery, H29.)

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