A Rosy Repast

Natural History, May, 1999 by Robb Walsh

On a magical evening, a bouquet becomes a banquet.

Ever so gently, the young woman gasped as I set the platter down on the table. It was a few days before Valentine's Day, and for dinner I had made quail in rose-petal sauce. The dish was made famous in the novel Like Water for Chocolate, by Mexican writer Laura Esquivel. (Tita, the woman in the story who cooks dishes that express her emotions, makes the sauce from roses given to her by Pedro, her forbidden lover.) Putting this recipe together, I felt a little as though I were preparing a witch's potion--and that the most magical of the ingredients were the red roses.

Flowers really aren't unusual in cooking; in fact, they are often essential. Bouillabaisse wouldn't be bouillabaisse without the intoxicating aroma of saffron threads--the orange-yellow stigmas of the purple-flowered saffron crocus. Hot-and-sour soup wouldn't taste right without dried day lilies, known in China as golden needles. And in New Orleans, no serf-respecting bartender would dare serve a Ramos gin fizz without a splash of orange-flower water. But in none of these flower-flavored dishes can you actually recognize the blossoms as such. As Jean Kerr's book Please Don't Eat the Daisies suggests, blossoms are eaten only by unsocialized toddlers.

Roses in particular, with all their romantic connotations, look odd on a list of ingredients. After all, when a man sends a woman a dozen roses, he doesn't expect her to make salad out of them. But in fact, roses have been eaten since ancient times. At some Roman feasts, rose petals were sprinkled on the food, the table, and all over the banquet hall. Rose petals--fresh, dried, and crystallized--as well as rose water and rose syrup, are still widely used in Middle Eastern cuisines. The pastry-and-nut dessert baklava, for example, is often served with a drizzle of rose syrup.

But while roses are a staple in our florists' shops; we Americans hardly ever eat them--which is a good thing, because modern pesticides have made the cultivated varieties highly toxic. According to Cathy Wilkinson Barash, author of Edible Flowers: From Garden to Palate, even if you could eat today's cultivated roses, you'd probably be disappointed. "'Queen Elizabeth' has very little flavor; `Tropicana' has none at all" she reports.

Barash grows flowers organically so that she can cook with them. And she has eaten dozens of roses in her quest for good-tasting varieties. "My favorite eating rose is the beach rose, Rosa rugosa, which grows wild along much of the Atlantic coast," she says. "It has a great aroma, and it tastes as good as it smells" If you're looking for a cooking rose to grow organically in your garden, Barash recommends the David Austin varieties, throwbacks to old garden roses. "`Gertrude Jekyll' is my pick of his cultivars" she says. Among the hybrids, she finds `Mr. Lincoln' (a velvety, deep red rose) and `Tiffany' (a light pink hybrid) the tastiest. Carrot slaw on a bed of pink `Tiffany' rose petals is one of Barash's favorite salad recipes.

Flowers are also popular these days with innovative and romantic young cooks like Danielle Custer, the executive chef of Laurels Restaurant in Dallas. "I use a rose petal-infused oil for salads" she says. "I also serve my lobster bisque with rose petals sprinkled on top" We can thank the organic farming movement for the return of edible flowers to our cuisine. The pesticide-free cooking roses used by most American chefs come from gardeners in California, who air freight them to specialty food suppliers around the country. Chefs pay about seventeen dollars for fifty fresh thumbnail-sized blossoms.

So what does a good eating rose taste like? "I don't think roses really taste like much of anything on the palate" says Custer, "but there is an aroma and a texture and an association with their eye appeal that makes them very sensual, almost--what's the word?--aphrodisiacal."

The quail in rose-petal sauce that Tita makes in Like Water for Chocolate certainly is an aphrodisiac. After eating it, her sister Gertrudis "began to feel an intense heat pulsing through her limbs" Dripping with rose-scented sweat, Gertrudis goes to the shower stall in the backyard to wash. "Her body was giving off so much heat that the wooden walls began to split and burst into flame" Having set the shower stall on fire, Gertrudis stands in her backyard, burning hot and smelling of roses, until one of Pancho Villa's men charges in on horseback. "Without slowing his gallop, so as not to waste a moment, he leaned over, put his arm around her waist, and lifted her onto the horse in front of him, face to face, and carried her away" The naked Gertrudis and the crazed soldier make love at a full gallop as they ride away. The moral: Cook and eat flowers at your own risk.

I followed Tita's recipe pretty closely, except I added more roses. Not only did I use rose petals and rose water, as called for in the recipe, I also garnished the dish with an extra dozen tiny red buds. The young lady who ate the quail with me did not set my house on fire (I kept a pitcher of water nearby just in case), but the striking beauty and the deep perfume of all those roses certainly made her cheeks flush.