Ingredients · Flower

Cornflower

Centaurea cyanus · Asteraceae (daisy family)

Cornflower
The blue in your tea. Cornflower petals are in eighteen products here and they are there to be looked at: the pigment, protocyanin, is one of the few真 blues in the botanical world, and it survives drying where almost nothing else blue does. They contribute next to no flavour, which is exactly why they can be used freely — a handful of cornflower turns a plain leaf into something that looks like it was made on purpose. Lady Grey is the famous example. Where a label says cornflower, blue cornflower or cornflower blossoms, it is this.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partFlower
KindFlower
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromEurope (native range)
TasteAlmost nothing — a faint clove-like sweetness at most. It is in the blend for the blue

How to use it

Scattered into a blend for colour. It holds its blue through boiling water, which is unusual. Also used to decorate cakes and salads, where it is doing the same job. There is no reason to use it for flavour and no harm in using plenty.

With food

Anything it is scattered on — it is a visual ingredient rather than a flavour one.

With spices

Bergamot, in Lady Grey. Rose and lavender, for a flower blend that reads as deliberate.

With tea

Earl Grey and Lady Grey. White tea and pale greens, where blue shows best. Rooibos, for the contrast against red.

Its story

Where it comes from

Native to Europe and now naturalised widely, including in North America and parts of Australia. It was once a common weed of grain fields — which is where the name comes from, corn in the British sense of cereal — and that is no longer true: it is endangered in its native habitat by agricultural intensification, and in the United Kingdom it declined from 264 sites to just three in fifty years. Better seed cleaning, heavier nitrogen and herbicides did it.

What happened

A flower that ended up on several countries' emblems. It has been the national flower of Estonia since 1969, and it is one of the national symbols of Germany, through Queen Louise of Prussia. In France it is the bleuet de France, the flower of remembrance for veterans and for the armistice of 1918 — the French counterpart to the poppy worn across the Commonwealth. There is something worth noticing in that: a weed of wheat fields became the emblem of the men who fought in those fields, and then very nearly disappeared from them.

On the shelf with it

Every product it goes into.

Every ingredient in the shop

Explore

Other ways in

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