Edible Floral Bouquets

My Christmas gift – a little bundle of joy complete with rose-bud mouth – arrived early this year. Born last week at the Matilda Hospital in Hong Kong, her parents (my daughter, Natali, and her husband, Tony) named her Jasmyn. After all their agonising over names for both boy and girl (throughout the pregnancy they had chosen not to find out what gender the baby was), such a sweet name had many resonances for me. For most of her childhood, my daughter had longed to be called Rose, and even begged me at one stage to change her name by deed poll. I often wondered why she longed for this particular name – perhaps it was the poster from a gallery in Copenhagen which hung over her bed all through her childhood?  On this, a magnificent bouquet of flowers which includes pale pink peony roses, is accompanied by a verse from Hans Christian Anderson: “Just living is not enough!  One must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower.” Or perhaps it was because I’d always left a small posy of Cecile Brunner rosebuds by her bedside when they were in season?  We’d been lucky, just before she was born, to move into a house with a rambling Cecil Brunner rose bush along one of the side fences.  This dainty pale pink rose with ruffled flowers and pretty pink rosebuds is not just exquisite to look at, it also has a classic rose perfume not unlike rose oil. Or maybe it had something to do with my grand-mother’s old-fashioned, floral name, Dahlia Pearl, a name she’d always loved? Now we have a Jasmyn in the family.  Soon after hearing the news, I took myself off to one of  the local bric-a-brac markets and bought two pots of jasmine – one called Angel Wings (jasminum nitidum) and the other a Biblical Jasmine (jasminum sambac). “The sweetly scented, double white flowers of the Biblical Jasmine are ideal for a scented posy, corsage or bouquet,” says one of the stickers. “A beautiful climbing plant with large and richly fragrant flowers borne in small sprays in late spring and throughout summer,” says the other. I’ve planted them along my front fence (one in a shady position, the other in a sunnier position) and can keep an eye on both from the desk in my office as they grow. I’ve also discovered that the Biblical jasmine, aka Grand Duke of Tuscany, looks like a small rose and is edible.  Apparently there are many gorgeous varieties of Jasminum sambac (the edible jasmines) and the more flowers you pick, the more the plant gives.  According to the ‘PickMeYard’ blogpost (www://pickmeyard.wordpress.com/tag/jasminum-sambac/): “The fragrance from this flower makes me swoon from intoxication.  It smells so wonderful you might wish you could eat it and you can.  This flower is the glorious jasmine.  It has been highly sought after and prized for many centuries.” Her favourite way to enjoy these beauties is to pick a few flowers and add them to a jug of iced water. “That’s it. Voila! Jasmine Water.  You could let it sit for 24 hours or just enjoy it immediately.  I find that these flowers don’t need to sit for long to flavour your entire pitcher with a light floral flavor.  Refreshing and yummy.  I add sugar for the kids, but I prefer mine without.  My kids ask for this everyday when it’s blooming.  Since I usually have more flowers than I know what to do with, I usually just let some float in a pretty bowl on the counter to fill the air with the scent of jasmine. I think we are all a little happier when the house smells like jasmine.” Once my Grand Duke of Tuscany flowers, I’m going to experiment with jasmine-infused creme brulee, ice cream, lemonade and salad dressings.  I also need to find out if the Angel Wings variety is edible as there are many varieties of jasmine which are poisonous.  I’ll keep you posted. Postscript: In Allegra Goodman’s novel, “The Cookbook Collector,“ she refers to a recipe in the ‘Distillation” section of an 18th century vintage cookbook: “There, between instructions to make rose water and clove water, were instructions to make jessamine water: Take eight ounces of the jessamine flowers, clean picked from their stalks, three quarts of spirit of wine, and two quarts of water: put the whole tin into an alembic, and draws off three quarts. Then take a pound of sugar dissolved in two quarts of water, and mix it with the distilled liquor.”