Local Food Heroes - Stephen Wheeler selects a bunch of
flowers for Mother’s Day

Mothers Day is the busiest days of the year for flower wholesalers – often bunched together with the fresh fruit and vegetable sellers in the major wholesale markets, but there’s a blossoming year-round demand from top chefs for edible flowers.

Using flowers in cookery has been a hardy perennial over the centuries. The Romans used rose petals to mask the odours of meat dishes that weren’t as fresh as a daisy. Violets were added to rustic wines to enhance their bouquet. In salads, edible flowers play an obvious decorative role complimenting the colours of other ingredients. The French ‘mesclun’ – a chef’s mixture of baby salad leaves, often contains chrysanthemums, nasturtiums or marigold petals, but red poppies or honeysuckle would be equally fragrant and piquant.

Soon chefs will be picking wild garlic leaves from the Cotswold woods, but the delicate white flowers that follow the leaves are also edible, and make an attractive and strong addition to a salad, or melted with butter to drizzle over white fish. The trumpet-shaped, yellow-gold courgette flowers are a good seller to restaurants in spring and summer. Larousse Gastronomique, the chef’s encyclopedia, suggests filling them with diced shallots and black truffles, steaming them and serving on a bed of baby spinach with a butter sauce and chervil.

Confectioners have always used flowers; for example in crystallized violets, forget-me-nots and primulas. In drinks, elderflowers are being cultivated in the Cotswolds for cordials, and camomile flowers have been flavouring tea for centuries. They are also attributed to virtually every medicinal cure from insomnia to irritable bowel syndrome. The Chinese have used Jasmine in their tea for a thousand years – the Americans prefer using jasmine syrup to flavour marshmallows.

Modern pastry chefs are using borage flowers and lavender in their creations. Borage is one of the few truly blue coloured comestibles – it has a sweet, honey-like flavour and goes well with strawberries, or floating in a glass of Pimms in place of mint.

A modest selection of edible roses on the Paris food market today would cost you around £50, so you may be better off tomorrow with a bunch of daffodils for Mum – but don’t suggest you have them for tea – they’re inedible.

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13th March 2010

Mother's Day

Mother's Day