26th July 2010 – Borage and Kombucha: Beauty and The Beast

Having been at Fontsoleil already for a fortnight, I was considered something of an expert in the ways of the house. Introducing kombucha to the two new arrivals and watching their faces was the funniest thing I had to do. On my first day at Fontsoleil whilst being nosey in the main room, what I had been most intrigued by had been three covered dishes of increasing size on the shelves inside. The largest was over 40cm high and covered with a white tea-towel, and the smallest was a crumble dish covered with a plate. Out of curiosity I padded over for a closer inspection. I later learned that they contained Kombucha, but at this point I was none the wiser. I saw what resembled a large splodge of greeny-grey slime bobbing in lightly off-yellow liquid. Confused and vaguely repelled by this snotty trio of aliens in fizzy urine living so close to my prospective breakfasts, I had turned my attention to other areas of the room. 

Kombucha was like a fizzy drink, sweet and bubbly, but it’s also curiously both acidic and gentle at the same time. The best description that I could come up with was a slightly flat, slightly vinegary sweet cider, but that didn’t do it justice, making it sound revolting whereas the drink itself was actually rather nice. I had been drinking it ever since I arrived. 

When I first arrived and was being nosey around the living room, I had uncovered three receptacles containing aquatic phlegm-like aliens, and quickly covered them up again. These aliens, I found out, were the mother, a living organism which survived on fermenting green tea and cane sugar. In anyone’s eyes, the mother was no beauty: an ugly, flaccid, pearly-white, slimy and disgusting-looking mushroom which floated on the surface of the liquid that it mulled. Thankfully this ball of phlegm was siphoned off before being served so as not to put the drinker off their beverage. Michelle brewed kombucha at home for herself and Xavier to drink, and was also trialling it on the market stall. It had limited success, but a few dedicated buyers. She sold it on the virtue of its supposed health benefits as well as its refreshing qualities. She even sold it mixed with rosewater for enhanced restorative properties. It was supposed to be good for digestion – although I never quite understood why – and also for the immune system. I assumed it was something to do with the antioxidants in the green tea. Anyway, I was a convert. 

Kombucha wasn’t the only unusual offering to be found on the table at Fontsoleil. It surprised me the first lunchtime that I was sent out into the garden to collect flowers for the salad. I soon learned to identify which of the blooms were good to eat and which I shouldn’t take back to the house with me. Despite my reservations, I had become used to scattering flowers liberally over my food, and even to snack on them as a mid-meal-craving-crusher; they also brightened up the table and the plates. Presentation was of the utmost importance and a lot of love was put into anything that we ate. The simple joy of assembling dishes and being faced at the end with a colourful, meticulous spread of foods turned

eating into an art form: grated carrot in a bowl with tiny blue sage flowers, finely chopped raw red cabbage with a border of nasturtiums, bright green lettuce leaves around a pool of pink and white sweet peas.

All the flowers tasted different, too. A whole new spectrum of flavours had been opened up to me. Borage bore the tiniest of blue star-shaped blooms from where it took its alternative English name of starflower, supported by and half-encased in softly furred pale green stems and leaves. They tasted oddly but temptingly of seafood and iodine. Sage flowers were a similar size and colour, slightly more purple, which shared the flavour of their leaves. Nasturtiums were the medium-sized, orangey-yellow trumpet flowers which were spicy and a little sweet. Hemerocailles were enormous orange trumpet flowers with long, prominent stamens and pollen that coloured everything they touched a vibrant orange. They were very sweet, especially the trumpet neck. Unfortunately the ants had discovered this too, and it was advisable to break off the bottom of the trumpet and squeeze gently to see if any ants crawled out before taking a bite. Sweet peas came in lilacs and pinks and whites. They looked impressive, and should have tasted so, but their flavour was nondescriptly sweet and always left me wanting something more.