Subtitle: Titania's Book of Romantic Potions
As I don't have Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, and violets are blooming in my backyard, and the first recipe in ...Elixirs was for sweet violet wine; why not? Especially as one doesn't have to ferment the wine, only make a syrup to add to wine; pretty close to an online recipe from a Sephardic grandmother.
Four cups of fresh violets is a copse's worth; I got one cup, about half an ounce, and reduced the recipe accordingly. (Hardie calls for 4.5 oz. fresh or 1 tsp. dried, which oughtn't be equivalent. I think 1 oz. dried is likelier.)
The syrup is fragrant enough, and is an eerie slate-blue, which I approve of in a natural comestible. I had some left over after filling a bottle, so I boiled it harder to see if I could make candied violet blossoms. (Perhaps this experimentation was inspired by all the Viola odorata I'd tasted already. They're delicious fresh off the plant.)
Could I? yes and no; I'd have done better had I looked up basic hard-candy instructions (in Joy of Cooking) before I'd used half the remaining syrup.
The first problem with candying violets is that sugar hot enough to turn into hard candy will shrivel the violet, although they're still purple and recognizable. At the jelly stage, the flowers are more attractive, but I didn't have enough to fill a jelly-jar so I don't know how it would keep. (Would it need a boiling-water bath, or would the sugar content and temperature of the violet jelly sterilize the fresh violets well enough?)
My experiments were truncated because I forgot how rapidly candy goes from 'hot enough' to 'far too hot', especially when you only have a quarter-cup of syrup. The two tablespoons of recognizable candy drops I got right are violet-scented, and shade through a range of violet and purple; when it all foamed up and crystallized it turned pale brown, and the caramel flavor overrode the violet.
The violets sieved out of the original tisane were quite tasty, too, and there's a medieval recipe using them to make a pudding. Personally, I wouldn't use the saffron, however authentic. (I bet not having any was authentic, too.)
What I might do when violets bloom in the spring... common crocuses, purple with yellow-orange stamens, are also in bloom. I might check whether common crocus stamens are toxic, and use them to garnish a violet pudding, without mixing them in.
Saffron crocuses bloom in the autumn. Autumn crocuses also bloom in the autumn, and aren't crocuses, they're Colchicum spp., named after the island Medea came from - they're poisonous in every part. Careful.
ISBN: 0-7683-2497-1
So wrote clew in Cookery. | TrackBack