Honeysuckle Ramblings

I've been meaning to record another entry in this web log for some time. Since May tenth to be exact. I want to tell the world about the ten millionth wonder of the world which is HONEYSUCKLE SORBET. As far as I know this wonder is to be found only at the wonderful CROOK'S CORNER restaurant in Chapel Hill, NC. (Forgive me, but damnit, there is a lot of wonder in this world.) One lovely Sunday evening in late May or early June sometime, my girlfriend Charlotte and I decided to stop by for dinner. We had been thinking about honeysuckle sorbet and soft shell crabs because they had come up in conversations about Bill Smith, Chef at C.C., and author of the wonderful new cookbook SEASONED IN THE SOUTH: RECIPES FROM CROOK'S CORNER AND FROM HOME, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
Mind you, I haven't actually cooked anything out of the book yet, but I have read all of Smith's short essays and a fair number of the recipes, and I can tell you that it is a close second in charming to the experience of eating dinner at Crook's. If you are a fan of Crook's this is a wonderful companion piece to eating there, even if you never intend or never manage to cook from it. If you have never heard of Crook's Corner and have a slim to none chance of enjoying it in person, then this is the book to get in order to enjoy a great piece of what another, better known, Smith (Dean, that is) has been purported to call 'the Southern part of Heaven'.
You can even try your hand at recreating honeysuckle sorbet at home. Next Summer when the honeysuckle blooms I will be tempted to try this myself. But then again there is something ineffably attractive about not attempting this and enjoying the unique experience of going to Crook's to enjoy the yearly small batches made under the direction of the man who created this ethereal dessert. I have been assiduosly avoiding attempting to describe the sorbet itself because it will do it such a disservice. I guess this is more or less true of all food description. But if you are from parts of the south where the Honeysuckle blooms then you may have some idea.
When I was a kid attending Moore Elementary School in Winston-Salem there was a fence around the school playground where the Honeysuckle vines grew thick. When the flowers were in bloom I remember standing around with other kids, eschewing the more traditional pleasures of recess for the wild deliciousness of the Honeysuckle. We would pick the flower then pull out the stamen with as much care as an eight year old can manage. If we did this well, and the flower we selected was good and ripe, we were rewarded with a single swollen globe of viscous clear nectar (??!) which was packed with a perfumed taste of such subtle strength it makes me swoon to think on it.
We would gorge ourselves on this bounty and never get enough because it was doled out in such tiny portions. One sucked on many flowers which for various reasons packed less than the desired amount of Honeysuckle essence, thus the perfect ones were all the more precious. This whole process of being outside on a hot Spring day and smelling the Honeysuckle and knowing that the time was right for a session around the vine with friends, picking flower after flower and making a sour face over the duds and exclaiming with delight and wonderment over the perfect ones, but either way the taste lasting just a moment, then dropping that flower and stamen and moving on to the next, over and over, and still never seeming to come close to making a dent in the proffered bounty of small flower cones from the vines, I imagine this is all too marvelous to be bested by any restaurant experience as an adult.
But, my gawd, what a wonderful reminder of that childhood pleasure Bill Smith offers us for two or three weeks each Spring, when you can sit outside in the lovely courtyard at Crook's Corner and end an excellent meal with this cold concoction which is the equivalent of getting about five minutes worth of perfect Honeysuckle suckles straight off the vine.