Warning: this article is not for those who suffer from a nostalgic hang-up concerning anything that reminds them of their grandmothers’ nighties!

I was surprised too, but there it was in black and white: a recipe for a lavender and fennel crusted ahi tuna. In my search for interesting tuna ideas for another article I was researching, I stumbled across this recipe that intrigued me. I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised that lavender could be used as a herb in the kitchen, since it is a member of the mint family which also includes basil, thyme, oregano, sage, savory and rosemary. But still, lavender is for sachets, right? It gets its name from the Romans who used lavender flowers extensively in their bath water. The word “lavare” means to wash. The scent of lavender is particularly offensive to moths and other insects, which is why our grandmothers put it in their good linen and silk drawers.

I figured that this would be just another of the hundreds of recipes I clipped and saved and eventually threw out when they were too yellow from disuse to read any longer.

But as fate would have it, a few weeks later, I found myself at my first Farmers’ Market of this summer and just as I was about to leave, having done my part to support the entire island economy, I spotted a woman dressed in mauve. It was Aileen the lavender lady, and she sells dried lavender flowers by the scoop. I was having a dinner party that evening, and although I was serving chicken, not tuna, I couldn’t pass up this opportunity: good guinea pigs are hard to find. Aileen wanted to hear how the recipe turned out, and she also mentioned that she had baked bread with lavender before. I now also recall that I have seen lavender jelly at the market in the past.

This rub is made using fennel seed, dried lavender flowers, red and black peppercorns and coarse salt, all ground together. I don’t know about you, but I never seem to have success with a mortar and pestle. I think that unless you can bench-press 300 pounds, you should just forget about it. After experimenting with a rolling-pin and debating emptying out J’s pepper mill, I finally resorted to my hand-held blender, which did work to a degree, although there was a lot of ka-pinging of peppercorns off my windows and nose. I think that it may be time for me to invest in a small spice mill.

The smells emanating from my oven were tantalizing and the flavour produced by using the lavender was not at all like eating my grandmother’s slip! It was lovely; I would say very close to rosemary. The rub would also work well for pork and lamb. My company was suitably impressed; this recipe definitely a keeper. Further to finding this recipe, I have now found many references (well, maybe not many)for using lavender in cooking. In most cases it is used where you may have normally used rosemary. The fresh flowers can be added for colour to your salads, and the fresh leaves and stems used in almost any herb mix.