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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Japanese Chrysanthemum Salad
Blanch flowers in acidulated and salted water, drain and dry on towel. Mix with sliced, cold boiled potatoes, artichoke buttons, shrimps and capers, sliced beets, and hardcooked egg for garnish, and use saffron to color and flavor the French dressing. The French like chrysanthemum salad, too, scalded, cooled and then mixed with salad greens and French dressing, or as a garnish for fruit salads, especially pineapple. The only and chief trouble with this for feasting outdoors is that chrysanthemums come in football weather. But in the spring and summer, no matter what camping district you pick, all the way from Alabama to Wyoming, there will be any number of edible wild flowers handy. In most places you can actually eat the official flower of the State, not only out of hand, but in salads, preserves and many other ways. And if you're lucky enough to be a Floridian you can, of course, drink the bloom symbolic of your neck of the woods by dashing a few drops of orange flower water into any sweet tipple.
To take the place of the national florists' slogan "Say it with Flowers!" we stand ready to sponsor a coast to coast movement to-Eat it with Flowers! and that should streamline with our growing interest in taking things raw, for added vitamins.
And certainly no local partisan will deem us unpatriotic in suggesting this material use of the state symbol-for you can eat your state flower and have it too. For instance, if you are picnicking in the Badger State you can not only enjoy a bowl of woodsy violets as a decoration on your saw-horse table, but you can dip into a jar of homemade Wisconsin Violet Marmalade as well. In the Salt Lake region you can stick a stunning sego lily in your buttonhole and go to town with a big Utah Lily Salad, besides. This specialty is made after the Oriental style, where hundreds of edible flowers besides chrysanthemums and lilies brighten the everyday menu.
Indeed, if a State has any rights at all, certainly one of them is for outdoor appetites to enjoy its own flower every day in every way. Of course some flowers, such as the Goldenrod of Alabama, Kentucky and Nebraska, are better adapted to making hay fever than making a meal; but the great majority are edible even the Cactus of Arizona is commonly made into a candy that is much more popular than fudge in its home State.
So here is a handy guide to some undeveloped possibilities: 1 Alabama: Goldenrod-See above.
Arizona: Cactus-Besides cactus candy, a convenient roadside munch is a glass of goat's milk with a cactus sandwich. Or a roast kid and cactus sandwich in camp. Arkansas: Apple Blossoms-Use the separate petals to decorate salads, or hold out an apple-buttered slice of bread under a shedding spring tree until a few petals flutter down on it, to give it a flavorsome nip.
Two dishes are described here: a substantial composed salad built on blanched chrysanthemum petals, and the lighter French treatment of scalded petals tossed through greens. Both hinge entirely on the flowers you start with.
- Use culinary chrysanthemum onlyLook for edible-grade blooms or the Japanese leaf chrysanthemum shungiku (Glebionis coronaria), sold in Asian and Chinese grocers. Florist and garden-centre mums are routinely treated with systemic pesticides and should never go into food, whatever the flower's reputation as edible.
- Ignore the foraging advice around the recipeThe surrounding passage recommends eating wild flowers on sight, including state emblems such as sego lily and cactus. Those identifications are a century old, several are wrong, and some carry dangerous look-alikes. Buy your flowers rather than gathering them.
- Petals, not whole headsPull the ray petals free and discard the green receptacle and the pale heel at the base of each petal, which is where the bitterness sits. A generous handful of loose petals, roughly a cup, dresses the salad below.
- Acidulated and salted waterAbout a tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar and a teaspoon of salt per quart. The acid keeps the yellow and white petals from browning as they hit the heat.
- Blanch means secondsThirty seconds to a minute is enough; the petals should wilt and no more. Anything longer and they collapse into a grey thread with no perfume left. Drain, spread on a towel, pat dry, and they will keep an hour or two in the refrigerator.
- Artichoke buttonsPeriod usage generally means small young artichokes trimmed down, though the term is sometimes used loosely for artichoke bottoms. Canned or jarred artichoke hearts, quartered, stand in for them directly.
- French dressingIn this period the phrase means a plain oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette, not the sweet orange bottled dressing. Roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper.
- SaffronSteep a small pinch of threads in a tablespoon of warm water or vinegar for ten minutes and beat that liquid into the dressing, rather than dropping dry threads in. Saffron powder is easily overdone and turns medicinal.
- YieldThe quantities are left to the cook. Two cups of sliced boiled potato, a cup of artichoke hearts, half a pound of small cooked shrimp, two tablespoons of capers, one sliced cooked beet and two hard-cooked eggs makes about four servings. The recipe specifies cold boiled potatoes.
Eating chrysanthemum is genuinely Japanese practice: shokuyo giku, edible chrysanthemum, appears as a garnish for sashimi and in vinegared side dishes, and the leafy shungiku is a standard winter green for hotpots. Chrysanthemum turns up in American cookbooks of the 1930s and 40s, and the author's own appeal to raw food and "added vitamins" sits in that period's idiom, though why the flower caught on here is not documented. The wider passage belongs to a different impulse altogether: a boosterish parlour game of matching each state's official flower -- many of them designated by legislature in the decades either side of 1900 -- to something a camper might chew. The recipe survives that framing better than the guide does.