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Dandelions
Wash thoroughly, remove roots, drain, and cook one hour or until tender in boiling salted water. Allow two quarts water to one peck dandelions. Season with butter, salt, and pepper. Serve with vinegar.
A plain boiled-greens formula from a period when dandelion was a spring vegetable rather than a weed. The measurements and the timing both need translating.
- A peck of dandelionsA peck is 8 dry quarts, measured loose and uncompressed. The weight that fills it varies enormously with how hard the greens are pressed in, so any pound figure is only a rough guide; produce tables of the period put a bushel of dandelion greens nearer 12 pounds, i.e. around 3 pounds to the peck.
- More water than statedTwo quarts of water per peck barely wets that volume of raw leaves. Use a large pot with 4 quarts or more of well-salted boiling water so the greens are freely submerged and the pot returns to a boil quickly.
- One hour is far too longPeriod cookbooks routinely give long boiling times for greens. Young dandelion leaves are tender in 5 to 10 minutes; tough older leaves from a flowering plant may want 20 to 30. Beyond that you have olive-drab pulp with the flavour boiled out.
- Pick before it flowersThe bitterness rises sharply once the plant sends up a bud. Harvest the rosette of leaves early in spring, and cut just above the crown so the whole cluster comes away in one piece.
- Where you gather mattersDo not take dandelions from lawns or verges that may have been treated with herbicide, from roadsides, or from ground used by dogs. Cultivated Italian dandelion (catalogna) sold in markets is a chicory, Cichorium intybus, rather than a true dandelion, but it is bitter in a similar way and is cooked much the same.
- Wash more than once"Wash thoroughly" is doing real work here — grit lodges deep in the crown. Swish in several changes of cold water and lift the greens out rather than pouring, so the sand stays behind.
- The vinegar is structuralAcid is not a garnish on this dish; it cuts the residual bitterness. A sharp cider vinegar at the table, or the Pennsylvania Dutch treatment of hot bacon fat and vinegar poured over, is what makes the greens palatable rather than merely edible.
Dandelion earned its place in the vegetable chapter of an American cooking school text because it was one of the first green things available after a New England winter, gathered free from fields and yards in March and April when the root cellar held nothing but cabbage and roots. The name comes through French dent de lion, lion's tooth, for the jagged leaf margin; the plant is not native to North America but arrived with European settlers, who valued it as food and as a bitter tonic and had no intention of weeding it out. The pairing with vinegar, and in Pennsylvania German kitchens with hot bacon dressing, reflects a long-standing view of spring bitters as medicinal after months of salt meat — and the long boiling the recipe calls for belongs to a time well before anyone thought of vegetables as needing to keep their colour.