Important: Safety Warning
This page states that certain wild plants are safe to eat. Its identifications and edibility claims are more than a century old and in some cases simply wrong, and deadly look-alikes exist for many edible species. Never eat a wild plant on the strength of this text.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Some Kitchen Kinks: Lettuce
Lettuce. If lettuce has grown until rather too old for salad, it may be cooked, and makes a fairly palatable dish.
Boiled Lettuce. - Wash four or five heads of lettuce, carefully removing thick, bitter stalks and retaining all sound leaves. Cook in plenty of boiling salted water for ten or fifteen minutes, then blanch in cold water for a minute or two. Drain, chop lightly, and heat in a stewpan with some butter, salt and pepper to taste.
If preferred, the chopped lettuce may be heated with a pint of white sauce seasoned with salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg. After simmering for a few minutes in the sauce, draw to a cooler part of the range and stir in the well-beaten yolks of two eggs. See, also, "Peas with lettuce."
Swiss Chards. This vegetable is a variety of beet in which the leaf stalk and midrib have been developed instead of the root. It is cultivated like spinach, and the green, tender leaves are prepared exactly like this vegetable. The midribs of the fullgrown leaves may be cooked like celery.
Beet Greens.-Beets are usually thickly sowed, and as the young beet plants begin to grow they must be The young plants thinned out. pulled from the bed make delicious greens, particularly if the root has attained some little size. Unfortunately, of late years the leaves are attacked by insects; therefore, they must be examined leaf by leaf, and all which are infested rejected. Do not separate the roots from the leaves. Wash thoroughly in many waters. Put into a stewpan and cover generously with boiling water.
Add a teaspoonful of salt for every two quarts of greens. Boil rapidly until tender. This will be about thirty minutes. Drain off the water, chop rather coarse, season with butter and salt.
The vegetable may be boiled with pork as directed for "Cabbage and pork."
Asparagus. This delicious spring vegetable should be treated very simply, yet carefully. Cut off the woody part, scrape the lower part of the stalks. Wash well and tie in bunches. Put into a deep stewpan, with the cut end resting on the bottom of the stewpan. Pour in boiling water to come up to the tender heads, but not to cover them. Add a teaspoonful of salt for each Place where the quart of water. water will boil. Cook until tender, having the cover partially off the stewpan. This will be from fifteen to thirty minutes, depending upon the freshness and tenderness of the vegetable. Have some slices of well toasted bread on a platter. Butter them slightly. Arrange the cooked asparagus on the toast, season with butter and a little salt and serve at once. Save the water in which the asparagus was boiled to use in making vegetable soup. Another method of cooking asparagus is to cut all the tender part into short pieces. Add boiling water enough to just cover the vegetable and place where the water will boil.
Cook until tender (about fifteen minutes), season with salt and butter, and serve in the greater part of the juice.
If preferred, a cream dressing may be served with asparagus.
Globe Artichoke. -The large flower bud of the Cynara scolymus is known as the globe or French artichoke.
The flower buds must be used before they open. The edible portion consists of the thickened portion at the base of the scales and the receptacle to which the leaf-like scales are attached. In cookery books the receptacles are always spoken of as the bottoms. The parts of the flower in the center of the bud are called the "choke" and must always be removed.
When the artichoke is very young and tender the edible parts may be eaten raw as a salad. When it becomes hard, as it does very quickly, it must be cooked. When boiled it may be eaten as a salad or with a sauce. The scales are pulled with the fingers from the cooked head, the base of each leaf dipped in the sauce and then eaten. The bottoms (receptacles), which many consider the most delicate part of the artichoke, may be cut up and served as a salad, or they may be stewed and served with a sauce. To prepare the artichoke remove all the hard outer leaves.
Cut off the stem close to the leaves.
Cut off the top of the bud. Drop the artichokes into boiling water and cook until tender, which will take from thirty to fifty minutes, then take up and remove the choke. Serve a dish of French salad dressing with the artichokes, which may be eaten either hot or cold. Melted butter also makes a delicious sauce for the artichokes if they are eaten hot.
Spring Greens. After months of a very limited supply of herbaceous vegetables, which is the usual condition in the northern regions of the United States, there is a craving for "greens." In almost all localities many of the common weeds are tender and well-flavored when very young. If one has a garden, it can be so managed that there shall be an abundance of fresh roots and greens until the time when the regular garden products are ready. There are a number of plants that may be left in the garden over winter for early spring use.
Jerusalem artichokes, parsnips, salsify, leeks, and potato onions will give roots or buds as soon as the frost will permit digging. For greens there are such plants as curled green kale, and cabbage. The roots of these plants should be well earthed up, and when the real hard freezing weather comes the plants must be covered with hay or straw.
Spinach and kale, or German winter greens, may be sown in September. When the hard freezing weather comes protect them with leaves, straw, etc. Sorrel, if properly protected, will make a rapid growth as soon as anything begins to grow. It makes delicious greens by itself, or it may be cooked with other greens. It also makes a refreshing salad. The young shoots of the milkweed are almost as delicious as asparagus, when cooked according to the second method for cooking asparagus. In fact, the milkweed and asparagus may be cut up and cooked together.
The white goosefoot (Chenopodium album), better known by the common names "pigweed" and "lamb's quarters," grows in almost all cultivated land. When very young it makes good greens, and should be cooked like spinach. The dandelion, when gathered before the flower bud has attained any size, makes tender greens, and is greatly liked by many people because of its pleasant, bitter flavor. The cultivated dandelion is larger leaved, more tender, and of a milder flavor, and is also a fine salad if blanched like celery. A small bed of this vegetable will give a generous return in the spring, for the small amount of care it requires.
The marsh marigold, commonly called "cowslip," is found in many regions in marshy places. In the early spring this plant makes good greens. Cook the same as spinach.
Purslane is a weed common in most gardens and is very palatable as a pot herb. It is also cooked like spinach.
In the Southern States the young shoots of the pokeberry or poke tops APPENDIX are favorite greens, and are cooked like asparagus, while turnip sprouts, cabbage sprouts, and collards are favorite greens of garden origin. In some regions of Europe young hop sprouts are much prized, being cooked like asparagus. Though eaten to some extent, they do not seem to be known to many housewives in this country.
This page runs together two very different things: straightforward instructions for cultivated vegetables, and a foraging list that recommends several plants now known to be poisonous. The caution applies to the "Spring Greens" paragraph, and it is not a technicality.
- Pokeweed is the serious onePoke shoots (Phytolacca americana) contain phytolaccatoxin and related saponins in every part of the plant, with the root the most dangerous. The text says to cook them "like asparagus" — a single boil in a small amount of water, which is nothing like the repeated changes of water that Southern cooks traditionally used, and even that practice is no longer considered reliable.
- Marsh marigold, called "cowslip" hereCaltha palustris contains protoanemonin and is an irritant poison raw. Worse, it grows in exactly the wet ground where water hemlock and false hellebore grow, and a spring rosette of one looks a great deal like a spring rosette of another. Misidentification here is fatal, not merely unpleasant.
- Milkweed shootsMilkweeds carry cardenolides — cardiac glycosides — in varying amounts by species, and young dogbane shoots (Apocynum) are a close look-alike that is more toxic still. Modern guides that do treat common milkweed shoots as edible insist on positive identification first; the book's suggestion to cut milkweed and asparagus into the same pot assumes an identification its reader may not be able to make.
- Even the "safe" weedsLamb's quarters, purslane and dandelion are genuinely eaten, but lamb's quarters and purslane both accumulate oxalates and nitrates, and any of the three may be growing in ground that has since seen herbicide, road runoff or dog traffic. A modern foraging reference with photographs, not a century-old paragraph, is the minimum for any wild plant.
- The cultivated recipes are a separate matterBoiled lettuce, chard, beet greens, asparagus and globe artichoke are all ordinary vegetables. Nothing below is a safety issue — only a question of timing that a century of practice has revised.
- Boiling times, generallyTen to fifteen minutes for lettuce and thirty for beet greens reflect an era that boiled greens to submission. Lettuce wilts in two or three minutes; young beet greens need about five. Asparagus at fifteen to thirty minutes is far past the point of collapse — four to eight minutes for medium spears, tested at the thickest part of the stalk.
- The egg yolk finishThis is the hinge of the lettuce recipe. Once the yolks go into the white sauce the pan must not boil or the sauce curdles; "draw to a cooler part of the range" means the lowest heat you have, or off the heat entirely, stirring until it thickens.
- Measures and vesselsA pint of white sauce is two cups. A "stewpan" is a wide, shallow saucepan. "Blanch in cold water" here means to refresh in cold water and stop the cooking — the reverse of the modern sense of blanching.
- ArtichokesThirty to fifty minutes is about right for large globes boiled whole; test by pulling an outer scale, which should come away with no resistance. The advice to eat very young artichokes raw as a salad still holds for the small purple varieties, sliced thin and dressed at once so they do not brown.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; four or five heads of lettuce would make roughly four side servings, and chard and beet greens cook down to a small fraction of their raw volume.
The "Spring Greens" essay explains the rest of the page better than the recipes do. In the northern United States before reliable rail-borne produce, the months between the last stored root vegetable and the first garden crop meant a diet almost devoid of fresh green food, and the text itself opens by describing exactly that "craving" for greens. The tonic teas and bitter spring salads of American and European folk practice are often interpreted as a response to winter vitamin C deprivation, though that is a later reading rather than something the sources themselves claim. The context explains why a household book would send its readers into the marsh for cowslips and along the fence line for pigweed: the alternative was nothing. It also explains cooked lettuce, which strikes modern readers as a waste of a salad but was a standard use for bolted, bitter summer heads; French cookery had long braised lettuce this way, and the cross-reference to "peas with lettuce" probably points at a dish on the lines of petits pois a la francaise, where lettuce leaves are cooked down with peas and butter, though that recipe is not on this page. The egg-yolk liaison stirred in off the heat is the same French technique.