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Dandelions
They are fit for use until they blossom. Cut off the leaves, pick over carefully, wash in several waters, put into boiling water, boil one hour, drain well, add salted boiling water, and boil two hours; when done, turn into a colander and drain, season with butter, and more salt if needed, and cut with a knife; or boil with a piece of salt pork, omitting the butter in the dressing.
A plain nineteenth-century treatment of a spring green, with one instruction no modern cook should follow literally: the three hours of boiling.
- The cooking timeThree hours total will reduce dandelion greens to grey pulp and leach out most of their flavour and vitamin C. Young leaves need 5-10 minutes in boiling water; tougher, older leaves 15-20. Whatever the long boil was for, a single change of water plus a short simmer deals with the bitterness.
- Why two watersThe first boil is a blanch that pulls out the bitter sesquiterpene lactones; the water is discarded. Keep that step if your leaves are large or picked late, and salt only the second water, as the original does.
- "Fit for use until they blossom"Sound advice. Once the flower buds form, the leaves turn sharply bitter and the crowns woody. Pick in early spring, before the yellow heads appear, and take the whole rosette while it is still tight to the ground.
- Where you pickDandelions concentrate what is in the soil and on the surface. Avoid roadsides, lawns treated with weed-and-feed or herbicide, and ground where dogs run. Cultivated dandelion greens and Italian catalogna chicory are sold in markets and behave the same way in the pot.
- "Pick over carefully, wash in several waters"Not padding. Grit lodges deep in the crown, and other rosette-forming weeds grow among dandelions. Cut the root off flat, separate the leaves, and swirl in a bowl of cold water two or three times, lifting the greens out rather than pouring them off.
- "Cut with a knife"Most likely this means chopping the drained mass coarsely in the colander or on a board before dressing it. A few strokes is enough.
- The salt pork versionA 2-3 oz piece simmered with the greens seasons and enriches them; skip the added butter and taste before adding salt, as the pork and its cooking liquid are already salty.
- YieldGreens collapse to roughly a tenth of their raw bulk. A large paper bag of loose leaves, about 1 lb trimmed, serves two to three.
Dandelion appears in Buckeye Cookery among the vegetables rather than the medicines, which says something about the ordinary Midwestern spring: the plant came up in every dooryard weeks before anything sown in the garden was ready, and it cost nothing. The name comes through French dent de lion, lion's tooth, for the jagged leaf. The plant is not native to North America; it travelled with European settlers, who valued it as both a green and a bitter tonic, and it spread far ahead of them. Cooking it with a piece of salt pork, as the second version here suggests, is the standard American treatment of any strong green from this period, and much the same method seems to have been applied to other strong greens in books of the 1870s and 1880s. The three-hour boil is often explained by a general nineteenth-century wariness of underdone vegetables, though that reading is an interpretation rather than a documented motive.