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Frances Bissell: The Floral Baker. Serif Books, 2014. 176 pp.

You are unlikely to find this cookery book on contemporary cookbook shelves, where cele-brity chefs’ books outshine one another with their bright and glossy colours.

But Francis Bissell’s book shines in its originality and erudition and introduces us to the use of exquisite flowers in our cooking, in the same way we have become accustomed to using herbs and spices.

Here, we find how to use lavender, rose petals, saffron, marigolds, fennel flowers, nasturtiums and jasmine in cakes, breads, biscuits, puddings and savoury recipes too.

It is a book to delight the senses and capture the imagination – a book to read and learn from as well as to cook with.

Frances Bissell should need no introduction to serious Maltese and Gozitan readers and cooks.

She has, for a long time, had a home in Gozo and was the first British writer to come to appreciate and to take our cuisine seriously, noting the way we have absorbed the influences of our many rulers and invaders, the different cultures and religious movements.

For so many years Maltese restaurant menus offered, almost exclusively, the favourite foods of British soldiers and sailors and came to be denigrated by British journalists in the decades following World War II.

Current generations would find it difficult to believe how limited (with a few notable exceptions) our restaurants used to be and that the wide choices we are offered now barely existed 30 or 40 years ago.

Following her earlier work on the same theme (The Scented Kitchen ) Bissell teaches us how to use fresh flowers in our baking and we are offered recipes for quick and slow breads, with and without yeast, fruit cakes, sponge cakes, biscuits, meringues, macaroons, éclairs and celebration cakes to delight us with the addition of the subtle flavour of fragrant flowers.

Since we now know only too well the dangers to our health from eating too much sugar, we also find several recipes for savoury biscuits, pastries and tarts.

Bissell teaches us how to use fresh flowers in our baking and we are offered recipes with the addition of the subtle flavour of fragrant flowers

We are offered innovative versions of well-known sweets such as cassata, millefeuilles, madeira and sponge cakes, almond cakes and many more.

Here, you will find such delicious sounding recipes for orange flower Jaffa cakes, cup cakes with fairy butter, lavender snaps, saffron and rosewater biscuits, rose petal éclairs, floral panforte, chocolate combined with lavender and even a rose valentine cake for lovers.

Among the non-sweet recipes there are biscuits made with cheese saffron and sesame and others with walnut and garlic flowers and a saffron and onion tart.

There are clear instructions, too, on how to make lavender sugar, how to crystallise flowers and how to dry them for use in cooking. There are also warnings that we should carry out our own research on the edibility of flowers.

The author puts it like this: “Do not eat anything that you cannot identify simply because it smells as though it would taste good.” A great deal of research has gone into this book, its tracing of the history of recipes as well as sources where one can obtain commercially-produced flower essences – not surprisingly, mostly from Paris and other parts of France.

Many of the flavours Bissell gives in this book are familiar to Maltese cooks, in particular lemon, orange and tangerine rind and orange flower water, which are to be found in many traditional recipes.

Saffron has featured throughout our history, for it is believed to have been introduced to Malta by the Phoenicians and was greatly loved by the Knights.

Probably, because of its high cost, we have not devised many recipes using it, except for our famous Ross fil-Forn. In The Floral Baker, Bissell gives a number of recipes using this treasured flavour in biscuits, breads and tea breads.

Maltese food writers will also greatly welcome Bissell’s inclusion of four of our most loved sweet recipes.

It is worth nothing that lavender is not profuse in Malta, but that which grows wild is Lavandula augustifolia, not the Hidcote recommended here.

It is surprising to learn that we have no official Maltese name for our lavender and neither is it protected by law.

It is not listed in the flora section of the National Red Data Book (Lanfranco, 1989). However, it is also grown in gardens and pots.