MANY of us probably eat “botanical” ingredients all the time, in curries, stir-fries and takeouts from our local Thai, but how much attention do we really pay to them?

We’re talking flowers, seeds, leaves and fruit – and food writer Elly McCausland is on a mission to bring these small underrated ingredients to the forefront and celebrate the big role they can play.

“They aren’t always centre stage but they’re the backbone of the dish and provide really important flavour accents. We don’t always give these ingredients as much attention as they deserve,” she says.

“A lot of the time, we think about the protein first, or the carbohydrate, and then we build a dish from there, whereas I’m thinking, ‘OK I have a pear, what can I do with that’?”

Her first cookbook, The Botanical Kitchen, is packed with recipes celebrating fruits (like orchard fruit or berries), leaves (banana leaves, kaffir lime leaves and herbs), flowers (lavender, saffron and elderflower) and seeds (cardamom or poppy). And it’s all about letting these little powerhouses shine by doing as little as possible to them.

But some might feel a bit alien to many home cooks. After all, how often do you really cook with flowers?

“When I was describing the book to someone and said there was a chapter on flowers, they looked at me like I was a bit mad,” Elly admits. “I discovered lamb goes really well with lavender... just enough to get a slightly resinous, grassy taste, it really brings out the natural herbiness of the meat. Ditto with chicken and rose.”

She knows these ingredients can seem daunting, but adds: “My advice would be to use sparingly, they are quite powerful, like rose and lavender, you don’t want to end up with a dish tasting like soap.

“But the other thing I’d say is to be open-minded. We tend to associate floral flavours with sweets such as Turkish delight and sugared violets but actually a little bit of floral can have a really powerful and wonderful effect on savoury food.”

Are people she cooks for surprised by her (sometimes) unusual flavour combinations? “Yes I think so but I hope pleasantly surprised.”

British but based in Oslo for her other job as a university lecturer, Elly has taken a lot of inspiration from her travels around the world. There’s North African and Middle Eastern notes in her cauliflower, date and preserved lemon dumplings with pomegranate and tahini dipping sauce, and Japanese influence in her Soba noodles with crab, pomelo, yuzu and avocado.

“There are cuisines that are a lot more complex than ours in their use of botanicals,” she says. “Thai, Indian and Southeast Asian food in general. If you think of the number of botanicals that go into a simple soup, or for a Thai curry paste, you’re looking at probably 15 different ingredients, most of which are botanicals such as galangal, lemongrass, vine leaves. The way they layer flavours, that’s something we’re working on in our cooking in Europe but it’s something certain countries have been doing for thousands of years.”

The Botanical Kitchen by Elly McCausland, photography by Polly Webster, is published by Bloomsbury Absolute, priced £26.