Forget the Pork. Add Some Flower Power to Your Quesadillas.

Hibiscus quesadilla.CreditBobby Doherty for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Margaret MacMillan Jones.
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CreditCreditBobby Doherty for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Margaret MacMillan Jones.
At Super King, the Armenian-owned grocery chain with a hectic parking lot near my house in Los Angeles, I buy dried hibiscus flowers in bulk from a deep self-serve bin with a perpetually sticky-handled scoop. I say “flowers,” but in the kitchen, the bright red, sour wrinkles we call hibiscus aren’t really the flowers. We cook with the thick, protective covers of the Hibiscus sabdariffa — the tart red calyxes that shield its little buds, then stay on the plant even after the flowers have bloomed and fallen.
Also called roselle, red sorrel, sour-sour, flor de jamaica — every name for this hibiscus is a reminder that it has a place in kitchens around the world, in drinks and syrups and remedies and stews. The calyxes also happen to have a high pectin content, which once made them a favorite among the world’s jelly makers, though more recently, hibiscus has been pulled away from sweets and sugary jams and into the orbit of health foods (probably because in addition to its shocking, staining, hot pink color and phenolic antioxidants, it’s a source of vitamin C). It has also been marketed as a kind of meat replacement, because after the dried hibiscus is steeped in water and rehydrated, then sautéed in a little bit of fat, the fibers can soften, giving the hibiscus a gentle chew and the look of stewed meat.
Dried hibiscus soaking in water.CreditBobby Doherty for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Margaret MacMillan Jones.
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CreditBobby Doherty for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Margaret MacMillan Jones.
Adriana Almazán Lahl, who has a simple, delicious recipe for hibiscus quesadillas in the new cookbook “We Are La Cocina: Recipes in Pursuit of the American Dream,” reminded me that in Mexico, flowers came first — it was pork that was introduced by colonists. “Mexican cooking was mostly vegetarian for a long time,” said Lahl, the owner of Sal de Vida, a catering business in San Francisco. “We used to cook with a little fish, a lot of insects, but mostly vegetables, herbs and corn. Every region has different flowers that cooks work with now, and hibiscus is one of them.”