Dandelion Greens
Remove the roots, carefully pick over (discarding all tough and wilted leaves) and wash dandelion leaves in several waters; to the last water add salt to free leaves from insects and vermin. It will require one peck of leaves to serve a family of six. Cook leaves in plenty of boiling salted water until tender; drain at once and chop fine. Dress with butter and pepper; cut thin slices of bacon in shreds crosswise, try it out and pour over dandelions. (There should be one-third cup bacon fat.) The shreds of bacon are an attractive garnish; hard-cooked eggs may also be used as a garnish. Cut them in eighths or rings. Vinegar is sometimes added. Serve hot.
A spring greens dish that depends almost entirely on the age of the leaves and the amount of bacon fat. Two terms in the original need translating before you start.
- "Try it out"This means render: cook the shredded bacon slowly until the fat runs and the shreds crisp. The recipe wants one-third cup of fat, which will take roughly 6-8 oz of streaky bacon; much supermarket bacon today is leaner and wet-cured, so start with more than you think.
- A peck of leavesA peck is 8 dry quarts, a volume measure — loosely packed raw dandelion greens at that volume come to somewhere around 1 to 1.5 lb. Expect it to cook down to a small fraction of the bulk, which is why the original asks for so much to serve six.
- Salt in the last waterThe salted rinse is there to drive out insects and grit, not to season. Give the leaves at least three changes of water; wild greens hold sand in the crown where the leaves meet the root.
- Cooking time"Until tender" varies enormously. Young pre-flowering leaves need 5-10 minutes in boiling water; leaves picked after the plant has bloomed can take 20-30 minutes and will still be bitter. Pick before the flowers open if you have the choice.
- BitternessPlenty of boiling water is doing real work here: it leaches out some of the bitter compounds. Draining at once, as the original insists, keeps the greens from sitting waterlogged and going drab.
- Where you gather themThe assumption behind the original is an untreated lawn or field. Avoid roadsides and anywhere sprayed with herbicide; cultivated dandelion greens from a shop are the practical substitute, as is the chicory sold as "Italian dandelion" or catalogna, which is a different plant but behaves similarly.
- The vinegar"Sometimes added" undersells it. A tablespoon or two of cider vinegar stirred into the hot bacon fat before pouring makes this a warm wilted-greens dressing and balances the fat; without it the dish is heavy.
- YieldAs written, six side portions. With the eggs and all the bacon it stands as a light main course for three or four.
Dandelion greens appear in the May chapter, and the picking season for tender leaves is a matter of weeks: the leaves turn tough and intensely bitter once the plant flowers. The plant is not native to North America — it travelled with European settlers, who valued it as a spring tonic and a bitter salad after a winter of preserved food, and it naturalised so thoroughly that by the nineteenth century it was free for the taking in any dooryard. Treating a foraged green with bacon fat, vinegar and hard-cooked egg is a pattern sometimes said to recur in Pennsylvania German, Italian and Southern American cooking, and this version, with its careful note about the one-third cup of fat, reads as a household economy dish dressed up for a Sunday table. The habit of eating dandelion in early spring is often described as a blood-purifying tonic in period literature, a traditional claim rather than a documented one.