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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Jessamine Liqueur
Pick 1/4 pound of jessamine blossoms, and put them in a jar with 2 quarts of spirit of wine. Let the blossoms steep for two days. Prepare 11/2 pints of clarified syrup. Strain the jessamine spirit, mix it with the cold syrup and filter it with some paper through a filtering-bag; continue pouring the liqueur through and through until it is quite clear. (From The Book of Preserves, by Jules Fouffé.) Jasmine petals are also fine to mix with tea. They improve the flavor, which, as with coffee beans, gets better the longer the tea is kept, providing it's hermetically sealed. South Dakota: Pasque Flower-also called "gosling plant," which comes closer to food. If you want to make a hit with teacher, gather an armful of pasques, get to school ahead of her and have them all nicely arranged in a pickle jar on her desk.
Tennessee: Passion Flower-in New York City a novel drink is now bottled with a little sugar, a lot of water and the juice of the passion flower. It's sold by fancy grocers, and you'll find it both unusual and palatable enough to take along on any outing. It's so tart or bitter-sweet it might take the place of a cocktail, or you might fancy it with lady fingers, vanilla wafers or any lightly flavored cracker. It's an exotic, out-of-the-way beverage well worth investigating.
Try it Tennessee style, with a sizzling T-bone steak, or hog and hominy over a campfire.
Texas: Bluebonnet-belongs to the bean family, so you can chew the flowers with your next bean sandwich, or sprout some beans in camp and make them into a Chinatown salad. Of course the real State Flour of Texas is corn meal, which is baked into that elegant eggy yellow bread, referred to in the following: "Hitch your hosses to the Granjeno bush over yonder and come get some jerky, beans, and yaller bread, whilst I tell you-all Down East Yankees what a soft time you've had since our paws helped Old Sam Houston whop Santa Anna back in 1836."
Utah: Lily-the bulb of this sego lily was manna to the early Mormons, and look what it did to them!
Vermont: Red Clover-makes a nice decoration for a four-leaf clover salad. All Vermonters snack on clover honey, via the bee. It rivals their maple sugar and canned woodchuck.
Clover wine can be made only in a permanent camp, by fermenting a whole haystack of new mown clover in a wash tub with lemons, oranges, sugar and yeast; but then you have to stir it twice a day for 5 days and you soon get tired of that. Afterward you let it alone for 3 days, then bottle, leaving the corks loose for 10 days before you drive them home and wait a whole month to drink it. Altogether, a very wearying process, yet thousands go through with it, since clover wine can't be had in any quicker way.
Virginia: Dog Wood-maybe your camp watchdog would go for it.
Washington: Rhododendron either hike on to Oregon and sup on grape-bud soup, or try hop soup with the hop pickers, or make one of those phoney flower salads, in which the shape of any blossom can be simulated by using strips of hard egg white for petals, straps of gelatine for stems; anchovies, capers and such for stamens, calyx, pupils and what not. Begin with a daisy and work up to a chrysanthemum. With time and patience you may achieve something that looks something like a rho-de-o-do-do-dendron.
But, should you fail at this, go back to making daisy chains in one of the blackeyed susan States, say Maryland. West Virginia: Rhododendron or try Tennessee.
Wisconsin: Violet-let us sum up the violets-for-food situation once and for all. Besides violet ice and blueviolet salad, you have a choice of crystallized English, or double, violet conserve in the Italian manner, violet vinegar, jelly, marmalade, syrup, almost anything-even violets in a can of salmon salad: the idea in this is to cut thin slices of canned salmon, lay rounds of onion on top and, in the words of an ancient recipe book, (which calls for long strips of smoked salmon) "upon that cast violets, oyle and vinegar."
Wyoming: Indian Paintbrush-the dictionary, which prints all the language that's fit to eat, omits this flower entirely so we can draw our own conclusions on the edibility of paintbrushes, Indian or otherwise.
The liqueur formula rests on two things a modern cook cannot verify: which plant "jessamine" means, and what strength of alcohol is going into the jar. Both are reasons to read it rather than make it.
- "Jessamine" is not one plantIn nineteenth-century English the word covers true jasmine (Jasminum) but also Carolina or yellow jessamine, Gelsemium sempervirens, a wholly different genus whose flowers, leaves and roots carry the alkaloids gelsemine and gelsemicine. Poisoning from Gelsemium affects respiration and has been fatal. A quarter pound of blossoms steeped in spirit would be an efficient extraction of exactly those alkaloids.
- Filtering removes nothing that mattersThe repeated pouring through paper and a filtering-bag is for clarity alone. Paper filtration does not take alkaloids, glycosides or any other soluble plant compound out of an alcoholic infusion; a clear liqueur and a safe one are unrelated.
- Spirit of wineThis means rectified ethanol, historically in the region of 85-95 percent by volume, bought from a chemist rather than a grocer. It is not a drinking spirit, and high-proof food-grade alcohol is restricted or unobtainable in some places. Two quarts of it cut with a pint and a half of syrup still leaves a liquid stronger than most commercial liqueurs.
- No strength is statedBecause neither the alcohol proof nor the final dilution is given, there is no way to work out what the finished bottle contains. Historical liqueur formulas assumed a professional confectioner who knew the house spirit; the figures alone will not reconstruct it.
- Clarified syrupSugar and water boiled and clarified, often with egg white, until bright; proportions vary from book to book. It is worth knowing as a term, since it appears often in French confectionery books of this period.
- The tea note is a different matterDried true jasmine blossoms scenting sealed tea is ordinary practice and still commercial. That paragraph says nothing about the safety of steeping fresh blossoms of an unidentified plant in strong alcohol.
- If you want a flower liqueurUse a current recipe from a source that names the botanical species and the alcohol strength.
The liqueur is credited here to The Book of Preserves by "Jules Fouff\ftainly Jules Gouff\1