Flowers

   Since Antiquity and in every country, flowers have always been used in gastronomy.

   Romans and Greeks used to perfume their dishes. They used rose petals, marjorian flowers, made sauces with carthame (Carthamus tinctorius) flowers and flavoured the wine with roses, sage, elder, and violets. In the Orient, nowadays, people use dried rose buds as a condiment and they make jams with rose petals. But it is in the Far East that the greatest number of flowers is used for cooking (salad with chrysantheums, magnolias, jasmine, and hibiscus petals), and the yellow lily is used to flavour sauces and stocks. In Europe, we mainly use flowers in the aromatic beverages and in liqueurs ("vin de Mai" with asperule (Asperula odorata), cider with elder flowers ).

   Nevertheless, some well known spices and condiments are flowers : cloves, capers, vinegar nasturtiums, lavender flowers, and also rose water, balm water, orange blossom water. Alexandre Dumas used to serve a soup with weed and marigold flowers, and a violet soufflé. In salads we use the nasturtium, the borage, the honeysuckle, the poppy, the violet, the begonia, the primrose, the marigold, pineapple elder flowers, acacia etc....We used to smoke dried armoise (Artémisia Vulgaris) and corn. We roasted oak and barley acorns to replace coffee. In the Drome and Ardeche departments, the confectioners used the polypode (Polypodium vulgare) root (little fern) with a taste of liquorice to make sweets and nougats. They crystallised the flowers with egg white and sugar to decorate the cakes.

The Taste

   Sense which allows us to perceive the different flavours of the food, thanks to the tongue.

   We can distinguish four fundamental flavours : salted, slightly acid, sweetened, bitter, which, combined differently, define the taste of every food.

   When we talk about the taste of a food we allude to the information transmitted to the olfactory nerves as well as to the taste buds.

   Eventually, the taste is also the appetite : the desire of eating.