Darina Allen: A compôte and a rice pudding flavoured by our hedgerows
Darina Allen picking Meadowsweet.
If you have been meandering along the country roads for the past few weeks, you’ll have seen swathes of fluffy cream flowers along the verges, tiny sweet fragrant blossoms clustered together in irregularly branched cymes. The plant grows 2-4 foot tall and is called meadowsweet. The legendary Tudor botanist and herbalist John Gerard called this wildflower that blossoms from the end of June until mid-September ‘Queen of the Meadows’, and described how it ‘delighted the senses and scented people’s houses’.
It thrives in clammy meadows and ditches and along river banks. It delights me too and I love it for a myriad of reasons — not only the fact that it comes into season just as the elderflowers fade. I’ve been using the latter in so many ways but from now until September, it’s the turn of frothy meadowsweet. It has many medicinal qualities and is known to contain salicylic acid, one of the components of aspirin and has pain-relieving and anti-inflammatory properties. Herbalists value it for its many medical qualities, bees and hoverflies love it too.
