ISSUE 38, SEEDS, Part 4: Nasturtium
Nasturtium Seeds
I am sure that the first edible flower I ever ate was an orange nasturtium. My mother loved to grow the vibrant spurred blossoms and had read in one of her cookbook of the month volumes about the sprouts and blossoms being edible. She lived for novelty in salads. “Can you eat the flowers, Mom.” With a Barnum and Bailey flourish she dangled a lurid petal over her tongue, let it drop, gave a stage swallow and licked her lips.
Fast forward four decades. I am ready a recipe for celery sauce from a nineteenth century Virginia Cookbook, The Housekeeper’s companion, and come across an addendum from Mrs. V. C. P.: “If you can get nasturtium seed, use one pint of them. They improve all pickle, but are hard to find.” Immediately my brain lurches to an image of a seed packet for Park’s Orchid Flame Nasturtium Seed. $3.75 per pack of 24 seeds. Mercy—it would break the bank to get a pint of those.
But my brain had suffered a glitch. Earlier the recipe had spoken of celery seed, which is a seed added to pickle mixes. I had figured the nasturtium seed had meant the same. Wrong. Mrs. V. C. P. was actually referring to the greed seed pods, peppery tasting when green, like cress, or when pickled, like capers. In fact the German name for nasturtium was indische kresse. It took me a few days to realized that I had misconstrued the recipe and that the seeds were actually seed pods. Jules Arthur Harder’s great handbook on American vegetable cookery of the Gilded Age, The Physiology of Taste, or Harder’s Practical American Cookery (1885) nails the truth: “The fleshy fruits have a warm, pungent flavor, like the cress, and are pickled and used the same as capers. The small green ones are preferred and are used in sauces and with salads.” His recipe for preparing the buds is straightforward—see below.
Because capers need dry, warm, and rather stony environments, its culture failed in the eastern United States. So capers were imported, a pricey grocery stock item. Americans employed two pseudo-capers: pickled nasturtium seed pods and pickled marsh marigold buds. Both are easily made . . .