The dish like a garden

[Inkriql]

The cook no longer goes out to the living room; Receive visitors In some restaurants they pass you through the kitchen as part of an experiential tourist tour - the experience, they tell you - that has the head chef as a glare guide. Today is one of those days, but it must also be a day of the others, when they were rushed and something was overlooked. There are a few things that restaurants have learned not to show in customer visits and this time they missed the detail. As soon as I enter, I face the boxes in which they receive the flowers from the supplier, open on the counter where the assembly of the plates is finished. They are single-use plastic boxes, which makes them more shocking; the most delicate, subtle and elegant nature wrapped in its worst enemy. It also indicates that here you work with flowers and buds from forced crops. There are very few collecting restaurants and there are still fewer professionals who do that job for restaurants. These, like most of the ones I see in the dishes, come from greenhouse crops. Normally, when the flowers arrive, they are separated by families to avoid mistakes, center the work and keep up appearances, and when the tour begins everything is installed in containers next to each work position. Here the hollyhocks, there next to the purslane and in the background the daisy petals.

Today they had to have a hurry, because the box is present and the flowers are mixed. I stay for a while, without losing sight of the person in charge of flowers and buds giving the final touch before the plate comes to the table, and I see that they do not always use them for each dish. In this kitchen, buds and flowers are decorative elements. They do not arrive looking for a lace of flavors or to round the recipe, which explains the presence of a garlic flower crowning the honey ice cream that closes the lunch. I touched that flower as it could have been an oxalis, a carnation petal, a geranium or a mastiff; They all look pretty. Luckily it came from that box, and the taste was rather diminished, as if that garlic had little interest in being it. It occurs with all the flowers and shoots of forced crops: between the day of sowing and the day of harvesting, 40 percent of the minerals they were supposed to contain have changed for water. The flavor was lost along the way; pure game of appearances.
MORE INFORMATION

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There were always flowers in the kitchen, but there were not so many and they never got that far. Classic cuisine hardly used any other than zucchini, cauliflower or broccoli, which are also flowers. Today they are more than a resource; Many kitchens have them as a fetish ingredient, one of the axes on which they build their culinary identity. The plant universe is a great unknown. We have it in front of us and we don't see it. Carnation, geranium, daisies, mallow, sorrel, dandelion or wild fennel are still in the garden of our grandmothers, on the edge of the garden or in the nearby fields. Some were forgotten as the kitchen abandoned close relationships. It is possible that our grandmothers knew how to handle between sixty or seventy different species, and that the number was reduced to less than half in our mothers' kitchen. There are still many compared to those we are able to recognize in the wild.

Most are at hand. The botanist Evarist March showed me a few days ago during a very short walk through Lima. Three hundred meters gave for a few finds. Some as everyday as oxalis, a plague wherever you look, or wild mushroom, and other exotic and seductive such as peperomia, an ornamental plant whose buds offer a delicate and suggestive peppery flavor. Sometimes, you don't have to go to the market to make the purchase; Just look at the floor while you take the children to school.