Spring Fling

On Picnics and Edibles

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From Karyl’s Cook & Tell Newspaper Column (May 12, 1977)

One day the sun rose hot and they had a picnic. Cook & Tell took her new husband out on the hillside near the woods and sat him down on one of the small rocks that line the upper rim of the scooped-out embankment. It was spring. You could tell. Violets embroidered the lawn behind the picnickers, and at their sides, daffodils and narcissus stood in plump clumps tucked into the wild grass. A sky as blue as a pool held the world together all around the edges. Under its dome everything was awakening.

The chestnut tree held its promise in green pods against the not far-off day when its network of branches would go white with blossoms. Lily of the valley, lying beneath what was left of a winter’s weight of wood, pushed against the diminished log pile. With restacking would come the puff of perfume that would linger on the cool-warm breezes that bend around the southeast corner of the old house. You could tell it was spring.

The picnic menu that day was far from spectacular and deserved no notice. No one would believe Cook & Tell would serve her new husband such pedestrian fare as cottage cheese and carrot sticks anyway, accompanied by wheat thins and tomato bouillon. Not to imply that C & T was failing to live up to her potential; even Julia Child takes an occasional day off. But it wasn’t the viands. It was the setting. And it was spring.

At their backs a multicolored washload fluttered on the clothesline, which stretched from the barn to the apple tree. A gray cat rolled in a tuft of weeds, intoxicated by the new green fragrance. Spring had come. You could tell.

A visitor came, too, all unexpected and precisely at lunchtime. Cottage cheese, carrot sticks, crackers and bouillon being in abundance, and the visitor being on a weight-loss rampage, everybody jubilated over his unannounced and uncannily timed appearance. In an era when dropping in is almost a forgotten pastime because everybody is too busy or too scheduled or afraid of catching somebody in the middle of doing nothing or something, the unpremeditated arrival of a friend is like the landing of a visitor from a small planet. But it was spring, you see, and he knew it too.

That night, a whip-poor-will tried out his liquid song for the first time since the summer before.

The next day, the sun rose cooler in the pool-blue sky. By afternoon, a walk in the woods required a heavy wool sweater under the standard spring jacket.

Another day and the sun disappeared. Fingers went numb. Lips failed to form words easily as the cold breath of—what was it, sprinter? Or wing?—blew. Cook & Tell clung to an evanescent memory of whatever it had been two days before. She drank sun-brewed iced tea in a frantic attempt to salvage at least the fuzzy outline of an all-but-vanished season that had come and gone in a day.

One day, in fact, two days after the picnic and the daffodils blooming, the violets and gray cat rolling, the carrot sticks and the visitor calling, it snowed. It couldn’t last, but there had to be grumbling just the same. A snowstorm in the middle of May is traditionally accompanied by mild exasperation, resignation, consternation and a host of other polysyllabic reactions. In the immortal words of Eeyore: Pathetic, that’s what it was. Pathetic.

On the afternoon of the snow, Cook & Tell’s new husband arrived home from work bearing a freshly picked bunch of violets from the snow-covered backyard for his wife. Right before his eyes, she snipped off the blossoms just at the end of the stems and piled them on a thin strip of whole wheat bread spread with butter. White bread and sweet butter would have been better, she knew, but the purple bouquet was as unexpected as the snow. Violets are highly edible, though their flavor is elusive, if not downright nonexistent. Sensational and glamorous as open-face violet sandwiches may be (and make no mistake, if you like eating flowers, you’ll love violet sandwiches), Cook & Tell recommends this as the absolute quintessence of elegance in eating.

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CANDIED VIOLETS

Brush clean, fresh blossoms with egg white. Sprinkle with finely granulated sugar. Allow the blossoms to dry. When dry, store the blossoms between sheets of waxed paper in airtight containers.

A dainty tidbit to nibble, the epitome of a classy garnish, a gift for the man who has everything. A sweet treat guests will flip over.

Weather be darned, Cook & Tell has marigolds to chop and to add cream cheese at the proper season, nasturtium leaves to cut up into salads, rose petals to boil with apple juice for Wild Rose jelly. And a new husband to (pardon the expression) spring it all on.

sketch by my mother, Karyl Bannister

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Amie’s Endnotes

I was a month away from my teens when my mother wrote this, rocking a Dorothy Hamill wedge haircut and seesawing between innocence (marginal, at best) and the wild child I’d eventually become for the next twenty-some years.

On my summer reading list: Stephen King’s Carrie and the latest issue of Tiger Beat magazine with a pullout poster of Leif Garrett. Stacked next to my portable record player: ABBA 45’s, a scratchy Bay City Rollers LP and the Pure Prairie League album—the Christmas gift that inspired a different spelling of my name.

At that point in my life, I was not into eating edible flowers; an open-faced violet sandwich would absolutely have elicited a dramatic “ewwwww!” But if the edibles we know today had been around then, you can bet your ascot I’d have been first in line.

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Your Pantry Pals,

Amie & Karyl

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