Cassia Blossoms

Also called “cassia buds” and less frequently “honey laurel” and “sweet olive” in English, these are the delicate, five-petaled yellow flowers—the dried, unripe fruits—of the cassia tree. Highly aromatic and possessed of a flavor that is simultaneously salty and sweet tasting on the tongue, they are a feature of refined Chinese sweets. Cecelia Chiang, in her fascinating autobiography The Mandarin Way recalls that her father had Cognac-steeped cassia blossoms added to his tobacco. Culinary uses are equally lyric.