Flowers

Saying it with flowers used to be the thing – now we’re serving it with them. Edible florals have become quite the fashionable choice. There will be geraniums in your salad, lavender in your latte and hibiscus in your chocolate. Meghan Markle is making floral ice cubes, Jeremy Salamon is infusing his homemade vinegar with chamomile and Jamie Oliver is mercilessly pickling magnolia petals. There’s a Michelin-starred food joint-slash-florist in New York City, Il Fiorista, where you can get your favorite blooms stewed, baked, boiled or fried. The cocktails are swimming with garden truck, nasturtium leaves dye the buttermilk green and you could once, at any rate, lunch on sliced lotus root dusted with pine pollen (which sounds like a recipe for a positively Homeric sneeze).

In early October I bought three chrysanthemum plants to brighten my front doorstep during the gloomy days here in Montecito, California. The outdoor plant stand at Trader Joe’s, overflowing with a panoply of colored mums, reminded me how I love seeing French flair flourish when decorating with these seasonal blossoms. How, for a decade, I’ve been sharing and creating recipes with my daughter, a wine executive, with chrysanthemum flowers from her local organic épicerie and leaves discovered in a Burgundian marché. In Burgundy, as in the rest of France, mums are displayed for Toussaint (All Saints’ Day) on November 1, and for Armistice Day, to mark the end of World War One.