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Taste By Greg Atkinson

Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

It's good to remember the pleasures of such peaceful symbols

IN THE MID-1980s, dishes in fine-dining restaurants in Western Washington were routinely decorated with edible flowers. From pansies on the salad and nasturtiums beside the halibut to rose petals and lavender in the ice cream, flowers were "in."

These days, it's possible to eat out every night and encounter nary a blossom. Maybe cooking and plating with flowers has become passé. But there is a time and place for everything, and if there ever were a time for cooking with flowers, it's the month of May. Most varieties of edible flowers are at their peak of availability this time of year.

There are other, subtler reasons to consider flowers now. May is, after all, the month we celebrate Mother's Day in the U.S. Like many American traditions, this one has some radical roots. It was 1870 when Julia Ward Howe, author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," women's rights activist and a mother of six, wrote the Mother's Day Proclamation as an appeal to American mothers to work together for peace. She hoped her efforts would launch a national holiday, but one linked to the anti-war movement.

Who knew? When I learned about Howe's original intention, I could almost hear that old Pete Seeger song in my head, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" Like the proverbial daisy stuck into the barrel of a gun, flowers are symbols of a more peaceful world. Petals sprinkled over a salad, at once absurd and profound, make a certain statement. They speak in their own colorful way of social change.

My own forays into the world of edible flowers came in my early days as a chef on San Juan Island. The restaurant was ostensibly a French café, but for all intents and purposes we practiced what would eventually become known as New American Cooking. Without realizing it, we were taking part in the Great American Food Revolution, a movement personified by Alice Waters, sort of a Julia Ward Howe for our time.

The focus was on fresh, local and seasonal fare, and every spring, when the flowers started blooming, my kitchen partner, Kate Wisniewski, crafted her kaleidoscopic Petal Mix for the house salad. A composition of calendula petals, clove-scented pink dianthus and blue cornflowers, the mix was stunningly beautiful, and each salad over which it was sprinkled received an exclamation point of a single nasturtium in the center.

In those days, my mother-in-law, who kept a summer home in the San Juans, gathered wild rose petals every May to make jelly, and I followed her example and expanded on it. While Kate garnished salads with Petal Mix, I gathered petals from local wild roses for Rose Petal Ice Cream, and lavender flowers for Rack of Lamb with Lavender Jelly. We imagined that what we were doing was compelling and different, and I suppose it was. But like so many things we do when we are young, we'd gotten a little carried away. Eventually, we realized we were overdoing it just a bit.

These days, chefs apply flower petals with more subtlety and restraint. Reminiscing not long ago with Christina Orchid, another chef from the islands, I recalled the days of Petal Mix and Rose Petal Ice Cream. "Oh yeah," she said, "I still occasionally put flowers on things, but only when it makes sense — like if I make a soup that is flavored with chives, and chive flowers happen to be in bloom, I'll float some chive flowers on top. They're just so pretty."

As for me, I still occasionally stir up a batch of Rose Petal Jelly, and when I do, I recall peaceful days spent plucking wild roses on the sunny slopes of San Juan Island. It's the perfect way to evoke a spirit of peace.

Greg Atkinson is author of "Entertaining in the Northwest Style" and a contributing editor for Food Arts magazine. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Barry Wong is a Seattle-based freelance photographer. He can be reached at barrywongphoto@earthlink.net.