Honey-Flavored Memories

Savoring Nature’s Sweetness

Nature is full of marvelous microcosms we can enter, even if only mentally. One such microcosm was the world of my father’s beehives.

Honey’s dark gold reminds me of fall. And inevitably it reminds me of first learning to gather the bees’ bounty. While we can keep and eat honey all year round (see how I use it in various recipes throughout the seasons), we harvest it in late spring and finally in late fall, when “the maturing sun” conspires with the season

to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Just what those insects were up to in those “clammy cells” to produce such a heavenly food was a mystery. As an eight-year old, I couldn’t quite fathom that bees collect the nectar from flowers and transform it in their honey stomachs. The apiculteur (beekeeper) loved to explain this to me over and over, and I never tired of hearing the story. The bees were his third hobby, the other two being his garden and his pigeons.


The Beekeeper's Daughter

Granted the beekeeper was only an amateur, but my father seemed to know everything about keeping the colony clean, the queen healthy, and her subjects working—all conditions vital to a good harvest. Somewhat to my mother’s annoyance, he kept a few hives square in the middle of the flower gardens. In bee real estate, location really is everything. We watched with great fascination, though Father was not particularly good at finding age-appropriate terms to explain how the queen was the only sexually developed female in the hive, how she mates with all the stout male bees, receiving millions of anonymous sperm cells and laying up to three thousand eggs in one day. Hard to imagine how the birds and the bees (or the bees, at least) ever became delicate models of sex education. The queen is a father’s nightmare. Anyway, the game was more show than tell, and we spent hours and hours following the bees as witness to their purposeful busyness.

A solemn if scary moment was when I’d be allowed to put on long gloves and a straw hat with a veil of netting to help my father tend the apiary. There was no more exciting event than the early fall extraction of the honeycomb from the hive. As a child I felt a certain poignancy in seeing the fruit of my little friends’ ceaseless labors taken from them. But the bees seemed to trust my father, and they were not wrong. Of course he knew when the honey was ripe for harvest, and exactly how much to leave them so the colony could survive the cold months without flowers. He said they made more than enough for themselves, and so we were welcome to the rest.

Everyone loved the honey, but only my father and I loved the comb. It was, first of all, beautiful to look at, a gorgeous waxen lattice of painstaking construction, an insect Chartres cathedral. It was also the choice of honey connoisseurs. We cut it up and ate it like a house of gingerbread, finally forgetting the life-and-death struggle of the bees to make it. Sometimes I’d mix it with my favorite cheese, petit Suisse, although today I would substitute homemade yogurt. The rest of the harvest remained liquid honey, poured into jars, and consumed in countless ways during the year or given away as gifts.


A Honeymoon For Your Health

In winter, when on occasion breakfast was a thick slice of bread with a thick slice of butter drizzled with honey, we would always feel thankful for our father’s rapprochement with the bees, even without knowing what is known today: that honey, in particular darker varieties, is a significant source of antioxidants. It also had uses in ancient Egyptian and Vedic medicine and, until the development of antibiotics, was used to inhibit bacterial growth and heal wounds. It still makes a good facial toner. There is also a very simple reason French women keep honey in their diet: because it’s so sweet (approximately one and a half times as sweet as white sugar), as well as divinely flavorful, you can use less—in my case, about half the amount of processed sugar. It’s also more slowly digested, therefore less likely to cause the unpleasant effects of blood-glucose spikes. And with honey, you’ll never want for variety: there are about three hundred kinds. My preferences: acacia, clover, brambles, and lavender. You can taste the flowers of summer in the honey of fall. Don’t worry if it appears cloudy; it stays edible for years—bacteria may spoil other foods but not the taste of honey.

Sometimes I add a few drops of honey to the water I sip during long walks or other exercise. When cooking or baking, I substitute half the sugar in a recipe with honey. I drizzle it over thick plain yogurt, waffles, or pancakes. And my New York friends adore receiving honey from Provence. In fairness, I should point out that my Provence friends love to receive the fabulous maple syrup from my adoptive homeland. This New World sugar substitute, popularized in the colonies when sugar was heavily taxed, also boasts health benefits, including concentrations of essential minerals such as manganese, to say nothing of its own distinctive earthy flavors.

Sweeten-up your time in the kitchen with these lovely autumn recipes that use the natural flavor of honey to please the palate:

Figs with Ricotta Cheese and Wildflower Honey
Pear-Apple Compote with Honey
Duck Breasts with Honey Glaze
Butter and Honey Spread