Important: Safety Warning
This page states that certain wild plants are safe to eat. Its identifications and edibility claims are more than a century old and in some cases simply wrong, and deadly look-alikes exist for many edible species. Never eat a wild plant on the strength of this text.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Apple Blossom Cocktail
Shake pineapple juice, orange and cider together, pour into cocktail glasses and set an apple petal floating on it as sprightly as a celluloid swan in a bath tub.
California: Golden Poppy-only for opium and lotus eaters.
Colorado: Columbine-use it à la Mexicaine to trim the rim of any outdoorsy salad.
Connecticut: Mountain Laurel-as inedible as the wooden nutmeg after which the State is nicknamed.
Delaware: Peach Blossom- 1/2 CANNED PEACH I JIGGER PEACH BRANDY
The cocktail itself is three liquids in a glass, but the point of it — and of the whole "Blossoms for Food" conceit around it — is the flower, and that is where the page fails.
- The garnish is the problemThe recipe's flourish is a blossom petal floating on the drink, presented as food. Ornamental and orchard trees are routinely treated with insecticides and fungicides that are not rated for anything a person swallows, and the surrounding list treats flower-eating as a matter of decoration rather than of identification. A blossom is not a safe garnish simply because it is pretty.
- Mountain laurelNamed on the same page in the same breath as the edible entries. Kalmia latifolia contains grayanotoxins throughout leaf, flower and nectar; ingestion causes vomiting, salivation, and cardiac and respiratory depression. The text's joke about it being "inedible as the wooden nutmeg" is not a warning a reader can rely on.
- Columbine and California poppyColumbine (Aquilegia) carries cyanogenic compounds, principally in seed and root, and is not a salad trim. Eschscholzia californica contains alkaloids and is California's state flower; the line about opium is a period pleasantry, not botany. Neither belongs on a plate on the authority of this page.
- No proportions are givenPineapple juice, orange and cider are listed without any measure at all, so the drink cannot be reproduced from the text as it stands even setting the flowers aside. A current cocktail source should be used.
- "Cider" is ambiguousIn American books of this period cider may mean sweet unfermented juice or hard cider, and the two give entirely different drinks. Nothing in the wording settles it.
- JiggerIn the Delaware entry, a jigger is usually taken as 1 1/2 fluid ounces (about 45 ml), though period usage of the word varied and the book does not define it.
The "wooden nutmeg" is the old jibe at Connecticut peddlers said to have whittled fake spices, which is why Connecticut is called the Nutmeg State. What the entry shows is how casually edibility was asserted in print before field guides carried warnings: mountain laurel, columbine and poppy are handled as material for garnish rather than as plants with pharmacology, and readers were expected to take the author's word.