Traditional preparations
Transform, often without cooking
Ferment, marinate, macerate, crush, cold-infuse. These techniques have existed for centuries, and many need only a jar and a little patience.
Read before any preparation
These preparations belong to cooking and herbal tradition: they nourish and support, do not “cure” anything and replace no treatment. Ask a doctor or pharmacist before prolonged use, if under treatment, pregnant or breastfeeding, or for a child. Follow the stated storage precautions strictly.
Raw salads
Nothing to cook: the raw, crunchy plant keeps what fire would take, vitamins, colours, freshness. From spring's wild leaves to winter's grated vegetables, the simplest starter from garden to plate.
Nettle salad with young shoots
The plant that stings in the meadow becomes, once finely chopped, one of the most nourishing wild salads of spring.
Dandelion salad
Bitter just enough, the first dandelion salad announces spring and wakes the appetite.
Grated carrots with lemon and parsley
The simplest of salads, and one of the richest: the raw carrot keeps everything cooking would take from it.
Grated raw beetroot with orange
We know it cooked and dark; raw and grated, beetroot is crunchy, sweet, and a brilliant red.
Nasturtium salad, leaves and flowers
A salad you eat with your eyes: the bright orange flowers of the nasturtium, with their peppery taste, light up the plate.
Cucumber with mint
Freshness itself: crunchy cucumber and mint from the garden, the salad for hot days.
Ferments
The ancient art of entrusting the living to transform. Lactic bacteria and wild yeasts awaken flavours and vitamins, in foods traditionally associated with digestive comfort.
Garlic confit in honey (lacto-fermented)
Two age-old ingredients meet in a jar. A few weeks later, the garlic turns sweet as jam, and the honey takes on a quiet strength.
Nettle, garlic and honey, lacto-fermented
The vertical and the bulb, the wild and the cultivated, the pungent and the sweet. Three forces that meet in a jar, and that, after a few weeks, become a traditional spring preparation.
Homemade raw sauerkraut
A cabbage, salt, time. That's all. The simplest of ferments, traditionally associated with digestive comfort.
Lacto-fermented carrots with fennel and garlic
The crunch of the carrot, the aniseed scent of the fennel, the warmth of the garlic. A simple lacto-fermentation that brings sunshine to the winter plate.
Beetroot kvass
A ruby, almost earthy drink, sipped in small mouthfuls. Eastern Europe made it its table-side potion.
Cabbage kimchi (adapted version)
Korea's national dish and a fermentation that has gone global. The spicy, the sour, the umami meet in a jar, and what Korea eats every day, your garden can produce too.
Vinegars & oxymels
Vinegar and honey, two age-old preservatives. Married with plants, they become preparations passed down from generation to generation.
Garlic and thyme oxymel
Hippocrates already prescribed oxymel. Vinegar, honey, and two chosen plants: a simple, dry, luminous preparation, traditionally used to help the throat and bronchi through winter.
Four thieves vinegar (simplified version)
Marseille, 1720. Four thieves plundered the plague dead without ever catching it. Unmasked, they are said to have revealed their secret, a powerfully aromatic vinegar. Legend or not, the recipe crosses the centuries, reputed to be cleansing.
Winter blackcurrant-thyme oxymel
The deep black of the blackcurrant and the green-gold of the thyme. A spoonful in a tall glass of water, and winter takes on a tangy taste.
Raw pestos
Crushing releases the essential oils, not fire. One spoonful, and a whole garden condenses into a jar.
Nettle and hazelnut pesto
The nettle stings while alive, and nourishes as soon as it is crushed. Married with hazelnuts and garlic, it becomes a green cream concentrated in iron and minerals.
Raw tarragon and walnut pesto
Aniseed tarragon, rich walnut, sharp garlic. A French trinity that needs no cooking, and that wakes up any salad or raw fish.
Oil macerates
Time does the work. A flower, an oil, three weeks of patience, and the plant has given up its most precious part.
Calendula (marigold) oil macerate
The marigold, an orange and solar flower, passes its softness to the oil. Three weeks of patience, and you have a traditional balm for sensitive skin and small wounds.
Yarrow oil macerate
Its leaf, cut like lace, looks like a word of forgetting. Folk medicine, which named it “the soldier's plant”, credits it with stopping blood.
Comfrey oil macerate
It was called “knit-bone” in the English countryside, the plant that knits bones back together. Comfrey doesn't really have that power, but tradition has kept it for knocks and sprains.
Lavender oil macerate (evening oil)
The scent of lavender is traditionally associated with relaxation and sleep. Macerated in oil, it is an evening companion, a caress for restless nights and knotted temples.
Cold syrups
No pan, no heat. Just the slow infusion of a plant in water, the sugar of honey, and the tartness of a lemon.
Elderflower syrup (cold)
In June, the elder covers the hedges with white sun. A few umbels, some honey, water and a lemon, and you bottle a summer drink that smells of innocence and meadow.
Lemon balm and honey syrup
Paracelsus called lemon balm the “elixir of long life”. A plant that smells of lemon, traditionally used to soothe nervousness, and that lends itself wonderfully to a gentle syrup for restless evenings.
Preserving the harvest
When the garden overflows, summer must go into jars. Jams, chutneys, pickles, sterilised jars, the ancient art of holding a whole season to reopen it in the heart of winter. Here, the heat acts as guardian.
Homemade strawberry jam
The red of June sealed in a jar. Sugar, fruit, and a little patience at the stove, the simplest technique for a moment to last almost a year.
Apple-onion-blackcurrant chutney
Colonial India bequeathed to the English, and the English bequeathed to Europe, this brown-purple compote that wakes up any cheese, any cold meat, any winter.
Beetroot and shallot pickles
The deep red of the beetroot and the pink of the shallots in the vinegar, a jar that reminds us that preserving is also a visual work.
Tomatoes in jars (Appert method)
Nicolas Appert invented canning in 1810 to feed Napoleon's armies. Two centuries later, opening a jar of tomatoes in the depths of winter is still to find the exact taste of a July sun.
Cherries in syrup
A jar of cherries opened in December is June come round again. The waxy red of the fruit, the clear syrup glimpsed, and the sound of the metal being unlatched, so many promises.
Garden drinks
From orchard to glass: juices pressed at the height of the season, cooked syrups that sing in a soda, autumn alcoholic ferments and patient liqueurs waiting for the aperitif. Drinks your garden can make, some for children, others for winter evenings among adults.
Home-pressed apple juice
An apple holds its own glass of juice. With a press, a big bucket, and one October afternoon, you turn the orchard's basket of fruit into a golden cloudiness that has nothing to do with the stuff on the shelves.
Cooked blackcurrant syrup
The deep red of blackcurrant in a glass of sparkling water, the homemade version of the red soda that delighted childhood. Without colourings, without artificial flavours.
Homemade cider (beginner's method)
Cider is the natural adventure that follows the apple harvest. A few days after pressing, the juice starts to bubble on its own, the fruit's skin carried the yeasts, and there is nothing else to do but listen and wait.
Homemade crème de cassis
Dijon, 1841: a café owner, Auguste-Denis Lagoute, turns traditional cassis into 'crème de cassis'. A century later, served with a white aligoté wine at the receptions of Canon Kir, mayor of the city from 1945, the blend takes his name and becomes famous far beyond Burgundy.
Cooked grape juice
In September, the clusters hang heavy on the trellis. Before the wasps see to them and before you think of wine, take a part of them for this deep juice, a dense nectar that no supermarket can equal.
Homemade lemonade
Six lemons, sugar, boiling water, one night of waiting. The result has nothing to do with what's called 'lemonade' in the soda aisle, it's a burst of citrus, clear and precise, that refreshes like a bucket of seawater.
Limoncello (lemon liqueur)
The Amalfi Coast in an electric-yellow bottle. The zest infuses in vodka for a month, and out comes a digestif that holds the light of southern Italy in concentrate.