Nasturtiums - a first recipe ramble

"Besides being delectable, these floral “greens” seem indulgent, whimsical, and oh-so-gourmet." Kitchen Lane

The painting is by Monet. He loved them so much that one of the alleys in his garden at Giverny - the main one in fact - was lined with profuse beds of nasturtiums. Everybody says they grow like weeds - are weeds in fact - in the western world anyway - having originated in Central and South America - and then having been brought back by the conquistadores, they spread like wildfire. Apparently they also love poor soil and lots of sun. So even I should be able to grow an abundant crop shouldn't I? Not so. I've tried but all I ended up with was a few spindly plants. I think I was a better gardener as a child, because I do definitely remember lush nasturtium plants back then. Better soil and not much sun. Go figure.

However, today I am at last tackling my next first recipe from Beverley Sutherland Smith's A Taste of Summer. I think when I bought it - it was published in 1983 - I didn't look inside. It was by Beverley Sutherland Smith who was one of my heroine cooks of the time, and I assumed that it was - like Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking - about food you might cook in summer. But no it was all about salads, of which I know I have said before, I am not a fan. It has therefore been little used - if used at all to tell the truth. And I'm still not really all that tempted, because our taste in salads, has moved on from those years, to somewhat less genteel concoctions. I suppose there was always Salade Niçoise, and Caesar Salad, or just the basic but lovely French green or tomato salads, but otherwise not much to excite in the salad way.

Beverley Sutherland Smith herself says as much in her Introduction:

"Until some years ago 'salad' in Australia meant a collection of ingredients which mostly consisted of lettuce, some processed cheese either grated or cut into strips, a piece of sliced tomato usually under-ripe and inevitably a thick piece of beetroot. A sad miserable concoction."

And so in this book she sets out to improve the situation as here in her first recipe Tomato and egg salad with nasturtium leaves with the emphasis on presentation which is:

"of vital importance with a salad, since cold food doesn't offer much to our sense of smell, we must rely on a visually pleasing arrangement to excite our taste buds"

And you know I had not really recognised that. Her presentation style however, at least in this publication, now looks outdated, a tiny bit twee and genteel. It's much more rough and tumble these days. Many will doubtless ascribe this to Ottolenghi, but I suspect he has just popularised what was already a trend. Be that as it may I decided to just check out the current Coles Magazine for a typical salad presentation today. There were three or four in similar style - two of them from Curtis Stone, but this one - from Sarah Hobbs - their Food Director and one to watch I feel - is aimed at the everyday housewife -the quick and the simple. It's colourful and cheerful and includes so many fashionable things - labneh - which you make yourself with chilli flakes, sea salt flakes and ground cumin; honey, prosciutto, peaches, mixed tomatoes and thinly sliced radishes, not to mention the inevitable chargrilled sourdough. Not a beetroot in sight. Also Ottolenghified because of that labneh base on which it all sits. Admittedly you have to start 6 hours in advance by making your labneh, but that's just a question of planning. It also demonstrates Beverley's other dictum:

"the standard of a salad is based without question on the quality of the raw produce."

For quite a while I just could not summon up the enthusiasm for a salad with eggs and tomatoes, and which Coles at least doesn't seem to think is a match made in heaven - well that's what a quick online search suggested. I searched a bit further, but did not turn up much.

Beverley's recipe is not online of course. They very rarely are - just like Robert Carrier - however the nearest I found was this - Tomato nasturtium salad with dates and pistachios from Simple Bites, which on reflection I thought was an interesting comparison - no eggs - because they are old fashioned - but nasturtium leaves, and in this iteration, updated with dates, and pistachios and a touch of orange flower water in the dressing. So very today. The arrangement, as you can see, is a happy jumble, unlike Beverley's carefully carefully composed version with nasturtium leaves dotted around on top filled with a cream cheese based stuffing. Somehow the impression is not as generous as the ones we see today.

Having established that eggs were no longer a thing - not in salads anyway - I think they have been replaced by cheese of the feta/fetta kind or the mozzarella varieties - I decided instead to focus on the nasturtiums, beginning with three salads: Tomato and nasturtium salad with elderflower dressing - Sainsbury's Magazine; Nasturtium salad - Kitchen Lane; and Egg and fennel salad with nasturtium mayonnaise - Scrumptious South Africa - eggs were very heavily featured here with the nasturtiums but no tomatoes - all of which began to take me in different directions.

The two blogger sites, had some interesting things to say about nasturtiums, including the fact that the name comes from two latin words - nasus meaning nose and tortos meaning twist. I don't know whether the twisty bit refers to the twisty nature of the flowers' stems or the peppery taste of the leaves.

Bearing in mind my comments about how salads have changed in recent times, the lady of the Kitchen Lane website tells us that it's not a new thing:

"[in] an 1864 Turkish cookbook, Turabi Ejendi, reveals: “Put a plate of flowers of the Nasturtium in a salad bowl, with a tablespoonful of chopped chervil; sprinkle over with your fingers half a teaspoonful of salt, two or three tablespoonsful of olive oil, and the juice of a lemon; turn the salad in the bowl with a spoon and a fork until well mixed, and serve.”

Which is pretty modern sounding - and may have looked a bit like this one I found on reddit - just a picture, no recipe.

Mind you the lady of Kitchen Lane also warned - "a whole bowl of them can be too zippy and hard to digest." I think she is referring to the leaves here.

The Scrumptious South Africa lady added to this:

"Nasturtium leaves may have a lovely fresh, peppery taste, but they feel unpleasantly hairy on the adult tongue. ... So I abandoned the idea of using the whole leaves, and instead chopped them finely into a thick mayonnaise."

The recipe for her Nasturtium vinaigrette is included in the salad recipe and she added with respect to that, that:

"this salad doesn't keep: after two or three hours in the fridge, it tastes of nothing but onion."

Well most leafy salads don't keep for long do they?

However, she is not really critical of nasturtiums and waxes almost poetic at one point:

"I love nasturtium leaves because, like eggs, they remind me of my childhood. As a kid, I picked them, ate them, grew them from seed and - most important of all - spent happy hours marvelling at how water, when splashed on a leaf, formed a perfect silver sphere and skipped around like a bead of liquid mercury.  Apparently, nasturtium leaves repel water because they are covered with tiny nano-crystal bundles, with each bundle being about a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair."

You learn something every day.

She goes on to say:

"These are all garden escapees (nasturtiums are indigenous to central and South America) and although they have no business rioting all over the Cape Peninsula's sensitive floral region, I couldn't help screeching to a halt and picking several big bunches. (This, in the high-falutin' world of foodie correctness, is known as 'foraging')."

I don't think I've ever seen them taking over the bush here. But I have to say I'm sort of inspired to go out an buy a packet of seeds. There's something childlike about growing flowers from seed. And we oldies probably long to be children again.

Then I found a website called Sow 'n Sow which had 10 ideas for what to do with nasturtiums, which led me to various other sites. There are actually many ideas out there but herewith a selection with some thoughts. I can't remember now which were links from this website and which I found later on: Nasturtium pesto - Garden Betty; Nasturtium mini quiches - Sustainable Holly - the 'pastry' being a nasturtium leaf; Nasturtium and grape jelly - I couldn't find the actual recipe for this, but if I do manage to grow some nasturtiums I might try it - the ingredients are green grapes, white wine, nasturtium and sugar - which is a kind of guide; Nasturtium pod pickles - Cornersmith - yes you can eat the seeds too and these are sometimes 'called poor man's capers'; Hipster eggs on toast - Northern NSW Local Health District and Nasturtium pizza omelette - Inspired Nourishment.

There were dolmades too, and when I turned as a last thought to the River Cottage A-Z I also found butter - blitz 20 seedpods, 3 leaves and 2 flowers with 100g butter and a pinch of sea salt. "This is wicked with grilled steak, fried fish or new potatoes" says Pam Corbin the writer of the nasturtium page. She also suggests a 'vibrant vinegar' - "steep 20 (or more) nasturtium flowers, 2 roughly chopped garlic cloves, 1 sliced chilli, the finely grated zest of 1 lime and 1 tsp sea salt in 500ml white wine vinegar for 3-4 weeks before straining and bottling." Or 'stuff them [the leaves] with cubes of feta cheese for a treat."

Her final offering is a nasturtium and pink peppercorn soup - but of course this recipe is not online. Fundamentally it's a lettuce soup - as well as the nasturtium leaves you add other lettuce leaves, spring onions, peppercorns and garlic, melt them in butter stir through some flour, add stock, cook and blend finishing with that vital final touch of lemon juice and some flowers.

I fear Beverley's book is about to be given to the street library - well somebody might enjoy it, and I have a slim space for a new cookbook. Sorry Beverley. But I love all your other books and I think there are at least a couple more to go.

YEARS GONE BY

November 27

2024 - One thing after another

2023 - Pictures, words, irritations and detours

2022 - "Classics are the classics for a reason"

2021 - When is gin really gin?

2020 - Missing

2019 - Lucky dip part two - fancy and simple with scallops

2018 - Petits pois à la française

2017 - Tomato chilli jam

2016 - Flavoured salt