Color and flavor and perfume too.
Of all the herbs we use, either culinarily or ornamentaly, lavender is an aroma, a color, a flower and an herb. Certainly many of the plants which produce our spices have an aroma, but few of them are as versatile in usage as lavender.
Lavender is well known as the scent in a sachet or fine soap, but it lends itself as a flavor very well to honey lavender ice cream or infused into crème Anglaise or pastry cream for a nice perfume and flavor to the finished dish. Lavender flowers can also be pulsed briefly along with granulated sugar in a food processer to make lavender sugar.
Who Used It First
The word Lavender comes from the Latin verb, “to wash,” which makes its presence in soaps such a fitting addition. Romans used lavender to scent their baths, bed, cloths and hair.
Lavender, a member of the mint family, was likely found in the Mediterranean countries and the Middle East and India. It’s been making things smell good for some 2500 years.[1]
There are at least 28 species of lavender and of those we may be most familiar with only a few. English lavender, curiously not from England, is also most likely culinary lavender. “The names widely used for some of the species, ‘English lavender’, ‘French lavender’ and ‘Spanish lavender’ are all imprecisely applied.”[2] The various subspecies do appear different from each other with some flowers being staggered up the stem and in other species bunched all together. All are generally regarded as safe in normal food or medicinal quantities.[3]
What to Use
Continue reading “The Love Of Lavender”
Allspice is native to Jamaica. Columbus stumbled upon it on his second journey to the New World. Allspice is the dried fruit of the pimento Dioica tree and is native to the New World. It is picked when unripe, green, and allowed to dry in the sun where it hardens and turns dark brown and resembles a smooth, large black peppercorn. In the New World, this native tree does produce fruit in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, but the Jamaican allspice is the best. Best is defined by a higher percentage of the essential oil eugenol.
