[Sca-cooks] Clove gillyflowers, cloves, etc.

Christiane christianetrue at earthlink.net
Thu Apr 1 07:59:26 PDT 2010


When I volunteered in the Pennsbury Manor gardens, the pinks there were used as a garnish for sweets and themselves candied (and since everything was grown in the late 17th century manner, no pesticides or herbicides were used so everything was quite safe for consumption).

Since the Pennsbury recipes were drawn from a lot of Jacobean-era cookbooks like "The Queens Closet Unlock'd," this looks very familiar to me:

http://www.historicfood.com/conserve%20of%20roses.htm

Scroll down to the gilded sweetmeat of roses, gillyflowers, violets, and cowslips. Possibly something that would have been familiar to Elizabeth I.

In all, I am wondering whether the cloves/clove gillyflower debate is one where the meaning of the term (spice or flower) changes in relation to the type of recipe and the other ingredients, and also the period the recipe is from, as the heavy spicing in earlier recipes gave way to lighter forms (just as the Arabic influences were replaced by the Galenic and Greek). 

By the way, the heavily frilled miniature carnation varieties often grown today do not have the true clove-like fragrance of the older pinks varieties. So if you plan to grow your own, get the varieties grown for their fragrance, not their looks.

YIS,
Adelisa di Salerno




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