Flower Food

We eat roots, fruits and seeds, sure--but flowers? The idea of flower-eating is just a little too reminiscent of the nouvelle cuisine period at its giddiest, when you were liable to find nasturtiums, marigolds and Johnny-jump-ups scattered on your entree, as if it had passed through a florist shop that was shedding.

Well, squash blossoms don’t sound so wild, but that’s because nobody puts squash blossoms in bouquets. Anyway, squash blossoms have a sober traditional place in Mexican and Italian cookery, meaning you usually get a decent stuffing with them.

On the other hand, edible flowers may make us think of exotic Middle Eastern flavorings like rosewater or orange blossom water, or the candied violets that Americans secretly think the French eat just to scandalize us.

But we do eat flowers once in a while, and not only in herb teas (such as jamaica, the tart red decoction of an African mallow known to us from teas like Red Zinger).

Some spices are flowers, such as cloves (a dried flower bud) and saffron (the stamens of a crocus). The hops that flavor beer are also dried flowers. (Star anise, by the way, may look like a flower, but it’s really a deseeded fruit.) And then there are capers, which are pickled flower buds. Some people pickle nasturtium buds the same way, usually when they can’t get caper buds.

Curiously, two of the most flowery flavorings don’t come from flowers at all. Vanilla is the seed pod of a variety of tropical climbing orchid. The startlingly fragrant pandanus of Indonesia (known in India as kewra) is, though it boggles the imagination, a leaf.