Nothing takes me back to the Midwestern pastoral of my youth quite like the smells of springtime: freshly cut grass with an edge of lawnmower fuel, the sweet ozone of an imminent thunderstorm. Most of all, it’s lilac bushes, which grow stately and ragged in the hard soil of Chicago’s front yards, or peek over back fences to wave down the alleyways. In May, the tiny purple flowers would open; by June, their thick perfume hung in a haze around each bush, the barest breeze sending out intoxicating eddies of rich scent. When I left home and moved to the East Coast, I sometimes bought cheap lilac colognes—there are plenty of lilacs out here, too, but sometimes a person is a little homesick and needs a whiff on demand. Scent, so neurologically intertwined with memory, is an emotional catapult, and I found that even the clumsiest molecular facsimile of lilac would get the job done.
Until a few weeks ago, the idea of eating lilacs had never occurred to me. If you’d asked, I’m sure I would have stated, with unfounded authority, that the blossoms were inedible. Then, in late May, I saw a friend post a picture of her in-progress lilac infusion on Instagram. Another friend chronicled her theft of a lilac branch from a neighbor’s yard, for use in lilac sugar cookies. The novelist Amal El-Mohtar tweeted her preparation of a batch of lilac syrup: a bundle of just-picked blossoms, washed, then measured, and finally set in a bath of hot sugar water to infuse. Something was in the air, besides all the pollen and perfume. “Why did every person I know decide to do homemade lilac syrup this spring?” I asked on Twitter. The answer turned out to be Alexis Nikole Nelson, an Instagram and TikTok phenomenon better known as BlackForager.
Nelson has been foraging since her childhood, in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the ecosystems of Appalachia and the prairie collide in a riot of edible wild plants. Now she lives in Columbus, where she plucks the blossoms from black locust trees to fry up into fritters and turns the young shoots of woolly cattails into cakes. She’s chronicled her ad-hoc harvests online for years, mostly for a small group of friends and fellow-foragers, but when the pandemic began—bringing with it a surge of interest in naturalism and culinary self-reliance—her audience exploded. She posts about leaves, roots, and seeds, but the people want flowers: crab-apple-blossom milk tea, magnolia cookies. Flowers give us not only their aroma but their hue: in a recent guest spot on Drew Barrymore’s talk show, Nelson talked the actress through the process of making a violet syrup that changes colors when you combine it with other liquids. (Is it magic, or is it pH sensitivity? Who cares—it’s fantastic.)
Nelson is twenty-nine, with glorious curls and a gap-toothed grin. In her TikTok videos, she wears colorful clothing and makeup and delivers foraging and cooking instruction with the energy of a beloved children’s-show host: pulling silly faces, bursting into snippets of song, cracking corny jokes. One of her most popular videos to date, with over 4.4 million views, is her lilac tutorial, filmed on what she explains was a “no-good, very bad day.” “While I’m not really in the mood to chant about flower cookies, I know if I do I’ll feel better,” she says, and the video jump-cuts to Nelson swinging her arms and doing a monster stomp: “Flo-wer coo-kies! Flo-wer coo-kies!” She blitzes the blossoms with sugar in a food processor to make a purple powder. Then she mixes a portion with butter to make a dough (non-dairy butter, actually, because Nelson is, as she puts it, “a filthy vegan”), and sprinkles the rest over the tops of the cookies before she bakes them. Lilac blossoms taste like they smell: heady and honeyed, with a sultry, almost overwhelming depth. “This is actually really nice,” Nelson says, with uncharacteristic quietness, as she tastes a cookie. “I’m glad that I did this.”
Elsewhere in the world, foraging is second nature—Sweden’s constitution actually enshrines the right of every citizen to pick wild berries. But in the United States it remains a fringe activity. In Nelson’s TikToks, between delivering giddy identification guides and recipes in song, she discusses America’s history of anti-foraging laws and regulations, many of which target Black and indigenous people. “Race affects every act of foraging I commit,” Nelson told me, including her technicolor onscreen persona. “If I’m in a part of the city where the rules are ambiguous, I have to make sure that I seem very approachable, and look like I’m in a good mood, and have makeup on my face. A lot of that translates, on the Internet, as just a happy, fun time—no one’s going to call the cops on a person in some rainbow-chiffon dress. At least, I hope not.”
Unless you have an abundant garden of your own, foraging is the best way to find flowers to cook with. The edible flowers sold at some specialty grocers tend to be largely scentless, and are intended to be used as a garnish. The gorgeously aromatic blossoms sold at flower shops are often heavily sprayed with pesticides, which can’t be fully washed off. What remains is the wild world of parks, yards, and sidewalk medians, which is where Nelson is most at home. One of her first hits was a video explaining how to make an all-purpose simple syrup (an equal mixture of sugar and water) for floral infusions. It’s a recipe that she returns to over and over again, and one that she is seeing otherwise apprehensive foraging novices embrace without hesitation. “I know this year, especially, of all years, I have just been, like, Give me every single indicator of spring!,” she told me. “Last year was horrible, and winter was horrible, and I want to eat every flower. I want to smell every flower. I want to drink every flower. I want sunlight on my face. And those syrups are such an easy way to communicate those kinds of feelings.”
Where I live, in Brooklyn, lilacs abound in spring, but few of the bushes are fair game for foraging. Nelson discourages her followers from filching from plants that belong to other people—even if the blossoms are hanging tantalizingly over a nearby fence, and you’re pretty sure the owners have been at their upstate place for weeks, and you’re confident that you could sneak back, under cover of darkness, with clippers and a paper bag, and you’re absolutely sure no one would notice. By now, in Columbus, as in Brooklyn, lilac season is fading, and Nelson has started turning her attention to roses, especially the Carolina and multiflora varieties, which bloom weeks ahead of others and smell exquisite. I failed at obtaining lilacs, but I recently found myself with an armload of bright, aromatic roses from a nearby garden. I steeped the petals in sugar and water to make a delicately pink syrup, which smelled like languid sunshine, with traces of cinnamon and bubblegum. After roses comes honeysuckle, then poppies, then lavender, then tart, blood-red sumac as summer fades into fall. Next spring, it all starts again, which gives me plenty of time to figure out where to find lilacs.
Flower-Infused Syrup
Ingredients
- 4 cups fresh, untreated edible flowers, such as lilac, rose, violet, marigold, or lavender (the more aromatic the flower, the more flavorful the syrup)
- 2 cups granulated sugar
Directions
1. Separate the flowers from their stems. If using large blossoms like roses or marigolds, remove the petals and discard the flower’s center. Place the flower petals in a fine-mesh strainer and rinse gently under cool water, to clean off any dirt or debris.
2. In a medium saucepan, combine the sugar with 2 cups water. Bring to a gentle boil and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Add the flower petals, then cover the pan and remove from the heat. Without removing lid, allow the mixture to cool to room temperature. The longer the flowers remain in the syrup, the more intense the flavor will be. Taste the syrup after 1 hour of infusion, and periodically thereafter. Depending on your taste, the infusion can take anywhere from 1 to 8 hours, or overnight.
3. Strain the mixture into a bowl using a fine-mesh strainer, then transfer to an airtight container. Use in cocktails, to punch up sparkling water, or to flavor cakes or cookies. The infused syrup will keep in the refrigerator for up to a month.
