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Stuffed Nasturtiums
Chop parsley, chervil, capers and small pickles separately, mix into shredded tuna fish and bind with mayonnaise to thickish paste. Nip the pistils and stalks from big, beautiful nasturtium flowers and stuff with a heaping teaspoonful of mixture, pressing each petal firmly in place to close the flower and conceal the stuffing. Place decoratively on a dish and cover with French dressing. Pop into the icebox until needed for hors d'oeuvres and then garnish with winking blue borage flowers.
A cold hors d'oeuvre that depends entirely on the flowers holding their shape, so the filling must be stiff and the assembly late. Everything else is a matter of sourcing blossoms you can safely eat.
- Flower sourcingUse nasturtiums from your own garden or a grower selling them as edible flowers. Blooms from a nursery or florist are routinely treated with systemic pesticides that cannot be washed off.
- Preparing the blossomsPick in the morning while the flowers are firm, and pick more than you need since some will tear. Nipping out the pistil and the back of the flower -- the "stalk" here is probably the stem or the nectar spur -- removes the parts that make the flower hard to close.
- Make the paste stiffThis is the hinge: bind with only just enough mayonnaise to hold the tuna together. A loose filling weeps and the petals will not stay pressed shut.
- TunaOil-packed tuna, drained hard and flaked fine, behaves better than water-packed, which goes watery in the fridge. Chop the parsley, chervil, capers and pickles very fine or they will puncture the petals.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. Substitute a mixture of parsley with a little tarragon, or fresh dill, rather than dried chervil, which has almost no flavour.
- French dressingIn a book of this vintage this means a plain oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name now. Spoon it over sparingly; the flowers collapse under weight.
- Chilling"Until needed" should mean under an hour. Nasturtium petals go limp and translucent in a cold, dry fridge, so cover the dish loosely and serve the same afternoon.
- BorageThe blue star-shaped flowers are edible and mild; pinch off the black anthers and add them at the last moment, as they bruise on contact with dressing.
- YieldA 5 oz tin of tuna fills roughly 18 to 24 large blossoms, enough for six as part of a spread of hors d'oeuvres.