Martha's Violet & Sweet Woodruff Bitters (2009)

1 tbsp organic maple syrup
1 cup loosely packed violet flowers, assorted colors
about 1-1/2 tsp dried woodruff
Taaka Vodka -- to fill the jar ...

And the jar was an 8 oz. honey jar -- the sort that is sold as containing a pound of honey. (This should clarify notes earlier here, about small honey jars and one-pound jars.) (And Martha has the memory, now, that the flowers may have been all white.)

Once you combine the ingredients in these magical proportions, you let it sit in a dark, easily-forgotten-about corner for X amount of time, with X being a variable existing in a mathematical relationship to P -- your patience, of whatever sort your patience is. If you are like me, P is not a constant.

I would suggest setting your X at four weeks, perhaps allowing your P to shorten that to fewer weeks -- or to lengthen it to several months.

I offer this elaborate and complicated bitters recipe to satisfy the bitters-making ambition newly a-borning in Roger Dutcher, esteemed editor of The Magazine of Speculative Poetry. He has violets and woodruff growing in his garden and hopes to render them subservient to the after-dinner table.

Cheers ...