Home › Vegetables › Dandelions
Dandelions
Gather young dandelion plants before they have flowered; cut off the roots; wash thoroughly; boil in salted water about one hour, leaving the lid partly off. Drain and chop fine; season with salt, pepper or vinegar, and a liberal measure of butter.
If cooked with half spinach or beet greens it is less bitter and more palatable to some people. In this case the dandelion should be partly cooked before the other vegetable is added.
A straightforward pot of boiled greens, with one instruction that modern cooks should ignore outright.
- The hour is far too longYoung dandelion greens are tender and need 10 to 20 minutes in boiling water at most; older, tougher leaves 25 to 30. A full hour leaves you with grey mush. The recipe gives no reason for the long boil; if the aim was to reduce bitterness, changing the water once partway through does the same job in a fraction of the time.
- Lid partly offThis is not fussiness. Leaving the pot uncovered lets volatile acids escape rather than condensing back into the water, which keeps green vegetables from turning drab olive. Worth keeping.
- Where you pick mattersHarvest only from ground you know has not been treated with herbicide or fertiliser, and stay well back from roadsides and dog-walking routes. This is the real hazard in the recipe, not the plant.
- Before they have floweredTake the recipe at its word. Once a bud appears the leaves turn sharply, aggressively bitter and the midribs get stringy. Early spring rosettes, before any yellow shows, are the window.
- Cut off the rootsCut just above the crown so the rosette holds together, then split it and wash in several changes of cold water. Dandelions grow flat to the soil and grit lodges deep in the base.
- Quantity and yieldThe original gives none. Greens collapse considerably in the pot, so reckon roughly a pound of trimmed leaves for two servings, which will be a large panful of raw leaves.
- The spinach trickSpinach and beet greens cook in two to three minutes against the dandelion's fifteen or more, which is why the book stages them. Give the dandelions a head start and add the milder greens at the very end.
- SeasoningSalt, pepper, butter, and either vinegar or a squeeze of lemon. Acid and fat both blunt bitterness, so be generous with them; a little crisp bacon or its rendered fat is the traditional Pennsylvania treatment and works better than butter alone.
Dandelion is not a native American plant. It was carried over by European settlers — often said to have been brought deliberately, as a salad crop and a spring tonic, though accidental introduction with seed and ballast has also been argued — and escaped into every lawn on the continent. It belongs to a period when the first wild greens of spring were genuinely valuable food, arriving weeks before anything from the garden and after a winter of roots and preserves. The bitterness the recipe works so hard to tame was itself part of the point: bitter spring greens were widely held to "purify the blood" after months of salt meat, a belief usually traced to older European folk medicine rather than to anything demonstrated. The name comes from the French dent de lion, lion's tooth, for the jagged leaf.