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Nettles, Spring, to Boil
In many country places nettles are eaten freely as a vegetable in the early part of the year, as they are considered excellent for purifying the blood. The young light green leaves only should be taken. They must be washed carefully and boiled in two waters, a little salt and a very small piece of soda being put in the last water. When tender, turn them into a colander, press the water from them; put them into a hot vegetable-dish, score them across three or four times, and serve. Send melted butter to table in a tureen. Time, about a quarter of an hour to boil. Probable cost, uncertain, nettles being seldom offered for sale. Sufficient, two pounds for four persons.
A straightforward spring green, but two things in the Victorian method are worth overriding: the soda and the quarter-hour boil.
- Pick young tips onlyTake the top four to six leaves of plants no more than about knee-high, before flowering. Older nettles develop gritty calcium deposits (cystoliths) and turn coarse and bitter; the book's "young light green leaves only" is the whole of the matter.
- Gloves and tongsThe stinging hairs carry histamine and related irritants (formic acid is often named too, though its role is disputed), and they keep their sting until heat or a good crushing destroys them. Handle the raw leaves with gloves and wash them in a sinkful of cold water, lifting the leaves out rather than pouring them off.
- Where you gather mattersNettles take up whatever is in the soil. Avoid roadsides, field margins that may be sprayed, and ground where dogs run.
- Skip the sodaThe "very small piece of soda" was standard Victorian practice for keeping greens bright. Bicarbonate does hold the colour, but it destroys vitamin C and turns the leaves slimy. Salted water alone is enough, and the nettles will stay green if they are not overcooked.
- The boiling timeA quarter of an hour reduces nettles to olive-grey sludge. Two to four minutes in plenty of boiling salted water is sufficient; they collapse much like spinach. The 'two waters' was probably meant to tame any bitterness in older leaves, and is unnecessary with young tips.
- Press and scoreNettles hold water like spinach. Press hard in the colander, or squeeze in a cloth, or the butter will slide off into a puddle. 'Score them across three or four times' appears to mean cutting through the pressed mass in the dish with a knife, an old way of dividing cooked greens before serving.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn British cookery of this period melted butter means a butter sauce thickened with a little flour and water, not simply liquid butter. Plain butter, or butter with lemon and nutmeg, does the job as well.
- YieldTwo pounds of raw nettles for four is right, and looks absurd until they cook down to roughly a quarter of their bulk. Weigh after picking off the stalks.
Nettles were a classic English hedgerow green of March and April, gathered free at the point in the year when stored roots and dried peas were finished and nothing new had come up in the garden. The "purifying the blood" claim that the book repeats without comment belongs to a long tradition of spring tonics: bitter or mineral-rich greens eaten after a winter of salt meat, a habit shared with dandelion, watercress and young dock. The note that the cost is "uncertain, nettles being seldom offered for sale" is the telling line. This is a country recipe carried into an urban household dictionary, printed for readers who might have a garden or a walk to a hedge but would not find nettles at a greengrocer. Scotland retained the older uses conspicuously, in nettle broth or kail and the boiled nettle pudding recorded in nineteenth-century accounts, and nettle fibre was also spun for cloth.