Frosted Flowers

The English enthusiasm for frosted flowers with their pretty apppearance and sweet taste dates back to Elizabethan cooking and earlier. Most seventeenth-century cookbooks include a wide range of flower recipes for cowslips, roses, violets and calendulas or pot marigolds. Provided that the plants are free from pesticide sprays, edible flowers can be picked and eaten straight from the plant. Frosting is a simple and effective way of preventing an edible flower from wilting and also preserves the bloom for later use.