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When I was a kid, woodruff sherbet powder was totally en vogue! Sometimes, when my friends and I were walking back from school, we went to the local store and bought some of it as a treat. There was also a “woodruff” jelly of a light green colour and overly sweet taste but my mum refused to buy “this purely chemical stuff” (she didn’t say “stuff”). So the only reference I had on woodruff taste For a long time, the only reference I had about how woodruff tasted were the sherbet powders.

One day, when taking a stroll through the woods with my boys, I found some lovely flowers growing there in the half shade. I picked some and brought them home where I wanted to put them into a vase. Which I forgot to do. When I remembered the plants, they had already wilted – and were spreading the most wonderful scent of hay and vanilla (nothing chemical about that). We had accidentally found woodruff! Today, I grow woodruff in my herb garden and every spring (the best time is from April to June) I make some woodruff syrup from it to preserve that extraordinary scent. No chemical taste, no green colour, just four simple ingredients for a wonderfully herbal-hay-vanilla-fragranted syrup.

Woodruff Syrup

Ingredients

Yield: about 8 bottles of 250 ml

8 – 10 stalks of woodruff

1 litre water

1 kg sugar

1 lemon (organic)

Instructions

1. Pick the woodruff and let it wilt for several hours up to one day until you can clearly smell its scent.

Woodruff left to dry

2. Mix the sugar and water and bring it to the boil while constantly stirring. Make sure that the sugar is completely dissolved.

3. Cut the lemon into slices and add them to the mixture.

4. Let the sugar syrup cool down. When it reaches room temperature add the woodruff and leave it there for 2 – 3 days.

5. After that time, remove the lemon slices and the woodruff, bring the syrup to the boil and fill it into glass bottles.

Woodruff syrup will keep stable for about one year.

How to use woodruff syrup

You can add woodruff syrup to sparkling water to make it a lemonade or to sparkling wine for a great aperitif. Mix it with curd and yoghurt, fold in whipped cream and layer it into a bowl with fresh strawberries and ladyfingers to make a quick and easy dessert.

You can even use it as a base for kombucha or sweeten your rice pudding with it.