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Eat Your State Flower

WE ARE ACCUSTOMED to eating broccoli, artichokes, asparagus and cauliflower with never a thought that they are only flower buds cultivated to elephantine size. Few of us have had the curiosity to examine a bottle of pickled capers and discover that they are simply unopened buds which hikers all along the Mediterranean roads pick from caper bushes that grow like weeds in the shelter of the stone fences and walls. (Here we use nasturtium buds as a good substitute.) And the sudden transformation of French artichoke fields into thistle patches in the fall of the year, misty blue with flowers that will seed for next year's crop, is the first inkling the foreigner tramper gets of the fact that the big artichoke globes are only thistles raised to the nth degree.

With just as little thought we drink orange pekoe tea without connecting the white slivers that sometimes float in it with orange blossoms the Chinese have mixed in to scent it. Nor do we identify the jasmine blossoms or peony petals, which we occasionally find floating in our cup, with their perfume which lingers in the brew. Peony flavored tea often finds its way to the shelves of American fancy groceries, and what is known as Russian tea has been combined with jasmine blooms. But rose leaf, oleander and gardenia teas we have tasted only in China, where flowers are commonly used as food.

The Chinese, who maintain the world's most ancient and perfectly developed system of cooking, putting even the French to shame, have always eaten flowers, as well as drunk their perfumes in native beverages.

Perhaps hollyhocks fixed with soy sauce and fun wine would be an ill-chosen dish for us to begin on, but that is the way the Orientals snack one of our tastiest garden flowers. So let us start with the more familiar.