A summer of visits to fêtes and agricultural shows has left me with a guilty horticultural hangover. Massed in the back garden, waiting patiently for my attention, is a row of plants in nursery pots: white and purple phlox and scabious, some jalapeño peppers, a couple of strawberries, one with pink flowers and another with variegated leaves, and a pair of scented-leaved geraniums, properly called pelargoniums.
I didn’t realise it when I was given my first scented-leaf pelargonium, but they are the sort of plants that can turn you into an obsessive. Anyone who has read Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever knows of the wild rage for tulips that swept collectors in the 17th century. And most people interested in gardening know of the Victorians’ passion for auriculas, with choice specimens changing hands for fortunes and special auricula theatres constructed to display them to best advantage, against a backdrop of black velvet.
An obsession with tulips or auriculas is easy to understand: they are showy, almost sexy to look at. Scented geraniums, by contrast, are not. Originally from Africa, they migrated in the 1600s first to Holland, then to England. They are handsome plants with finely cut leaves, and easy to grow (mine live outdoors against a west-facing wall and survive neglect with aplomb). But their flowers are mainly insignificant, in modest shades of white, lilac or pink, and their presence is cottagey rather than captivating.
It is when you brush against them that you understand their power to enchant. At the base of the hairs on the backs of the leaves are little reservoirs of oil that release their scent on contact. Bruise a leaf and you release a pungent burst of scent. The range is amazing: spicy notes from cinnamon and nutmeg to chocolate mint; fruit scents of apricot, pineapple, orange, lemon, lime and hazelnut; aromatics of pine, camphor and citronella and floral notes of intense rose, sometimes with citrus undertones.
Elizabeth David recommends the use of sweet geranium leaves in blackberry jelly, blackberry and lemon water ice, and in a delicate geranium cream which is very easy to make. She suggests serving it with sugared blackberries but until the blackberries are ripe it is also good with peaches stewed in white-wine syrup with a dash of rosewater.
You need:
half a pint (300ml) of double cream,
sugar to taste,
six sweet geranium leaves
and, says David, “six small fresh cream cheeses, either Isigny or Chambourcy”.
Finding neither in Sainsbury’s, I tried the recipe both with fromage frais (the full-fat variety) and mascarpone. I think the fromage frais gave the better result; the texture is lighter — just barely set — and the effect less cloying than the mascarpone version. I used a combination of leaves from my new geraniums, half Prince of Orange and half Attar of Roses, but a mixture of lemon and rose (Bitter Lemon is a good sherbety variety), or a spicy fragrance such as Ardwick Cinnamon might work well. I’d be inclined to avoid chocolate mint.
Method:
Put the cream in the top half of a double saucepan and add the sugar and geranium leaves. Let it get thoroughly hot without boiling, then allow to cool with the leaves still in the cream.
Stir into the cream cheese (very gently, so as not to break up the leaves) until you have a thick, smooth cream. Put into pretty pots and chill overnight. Remove the geranium leaves just before serving (make sure you get all of them — a slimy bit of grey leaf in the spoon spoils the sophistication of this elegant little dish).
Sulman’s Pelargoniums of Suffolk (www.sulmanspelargoniums.co.uk) supply enough varieties of scented pelargonium to keep the most fervent obsessive happy, at about £2.50 a plant.