Day 19; Meadowsweet in white chocolate

 Meadowsweet, Filipendula ulmaria

According to Tess Darwin's 'The Scots Herbal', the name meadowsweet is derived from its use to flavour mead rather than it's contribution to sweet smelling meadows; however, it is now more popularly recognised for the sweet heady scent that it contributes to meadows and hedgerows on warm summer afternoons. The fragrance is quite hard to pin down, and can veer on the side of unpleasant to some; however, when mixed with white chocolate it seems to have an aniseedy quality that is really delicious. 

It has been used as a flavouring since Bronze Age or before, but also has an important medicinal history; it contains salicylic acid, an ingredient of aspirin, and has been used to treat malaria, fevers and headaches. Its Gaelic name is Chuchulainn and is derived from the story that the legendary warrier of that name was treated with meadowsweet baths to cure uncontrollable fits of rage or fever.

We use it in ganaches when in season, we also infuse the flowers into cocoa butter and use that to flavour white chocolate.  And more recently we have dried the flowers, and ground them into plain chocolate which has been very popular.

The chocolate used for this square, is our own Eich Ghael white chocolate – a gaelic name for the white horses on Loch Tay (there seems to be a convention in the big chocolate houses to name white chocolates after notable white features, such as Sierra Nevada, Glacier, Edel Weiss).  We use Chocolat Madgascar natural cocoa butter to make this.  The square has the cocoa butter print that we used for the thins – a nod to the Scottish Food and Drink award this chocolate won in 2015




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