Ritual

Cook

The plants that earn their place at dinner. Scattered on a cake, folded into butter, steeped in cream.

Heat, and when

Dried botanicals are not the herbs in a pot on the windowsill. They have already given up their water, and in a dry pan they scorch in seconds. Bloom them in fat over a small flame, or in something wet — butter, cream, stock — and give them time. If you can smell them, they are doing the work. If you can smell them turning bitter, the pan was too hot.

Where they actually go

Butter, first. Warm butter takes on a dried flower more completely than anything else in the kitchen, and holds it for a week in the fridge. After that: cream for anything sweet, a neutral oil for anything savoury, sugar for the top of a cake. Salt ground with petals, on a roast chicken.

Not a superfood

Rose in a shortbread is there because it tastes like roses. That is the entire argument, and it is enough.

The moment a culinary botanical is sold as nutrition it stops being cooking and becomes a supplement with a recipe attached — and the food is always worse for it. These are ingredients. Cook them like ingredients.