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Violet Salad
Mix endive with some fresh violet heads, without sterns, and also stir petals into French dressing to go on the salad. The smooth cheeks of the violets are refreshing to the tongue, they add color, sparkle and perfume.
Brought up in a Vale of Violets, that woodsy suburb of Chicago called River Forest, we used to sip honey from the calyxes of many wild flowers, and that of the violet is memorable. The stems we recall, were a bit soapy in taste, like wild cucumber or okra, but these aren't put into the salad; only the velvety petals and that one sweet sip of nectar in the calyx, just enough to give a bee a slight buzzing bun on.
A dressed green salad with violet blossoms used as both garnish and flavouring. The only real difficulty is sourcing flowers you can safely eat.
- Which violetThis means true violets, Viola species — sweet violet, common blue violet, Johnny-jump-up and other wild pansies. African violet (Saintpaulia) is an unrelated houseplant and is not eaten.
- Source the flowers, not the floristCut-flower and nursery violets are routinely treated with systemic pesticides that cannot be washed off. Use blossoms from your own unsprayed garden or from a supplier that sells flowers labelled for food use.
- Stems and calyxThe instruction to remove stems is sound; they are fibrous and, as the author notes, faintly soapy. Pinch the flower off at the base and keep the small green calyx only if you want the nectar the passage describes.
- EndiveIn mid-century American usage 'endive' usually meant curly endive or frisée, though Belgian endive was also sold under the name and gives a cleaner, crisper leaf. Tear frisée small; the flowers get lost among long ragged pieces.
- French dressingIn this period the name generally meant oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, commonly around three parts oil to one of vinegar, not the sweet orange bottled product now sold under the name. Stir the petals in shortly before dressing the salad.
- Dress at the tableViolet petals wilt quickly once dressed. Keep the blossoms dry and cool, and combine everything shortly before serving.
- QuantityNo amounts are given. A generous handful of blossoms, perhaps twenty to thirty, is enough for a salad for four; use half in the dressing and scatter the rest whole over the top.
- ModerationViolet flowers are mild, but the roots, rhizomes and seeds of many Viola species are strongly purgative. Use blossoms only, and treat them as a garnish rather than a bulk green.
Eating flowers is far older than mid-century America; violets were candied, made into syrups and conserves, and strewn on salads in English kitchens from the sixteenth century onward, and John Evelyn's Acetaria of 1699 lists violet flowers among the things properly put into a salad. What dates this particular version is the framing: blossom cookery written by someone recalling a Midwestern childhood spent sucking nectar from wildflowers. River Forest, the Chicago suburb named here, sits along the Des Plaines River, where the spring woodland floor does in fact come up thick with common blue violet. The recipe belongs to a strand of American food writing that treated foraging as nostalgia rather than necessity — a pleasure of the picnic basket, not a way to fill it.