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Dandelion Greens
Dandelions are not fit to eat after they blossom, as they then become bitter and stringy. Cut off the roots, pick the greens over carefully, and wash them well in several waters. Place them in a kettle, cover with boiling, salted water, and boil slowly for an hour. When done, lift them into a colander, press them to drain out all the water, and chop coarsely; then add one tablespoon of butter, salt and pepper to taste, and serve. Dandelions are sometimes boiled with corned beef or ham the same as cabbage.
A plain preparation that assumes a spring foraging basket and a coal range. Two things need rethinking: the source of the greens and the length of the boil.
- Where the greens come fromHarvest only from ground you know has not been treated with herbicide, fertilizer or pet traffic, and stay well back from roadsides. Cultivated dandelion greens are sold in bunches at many markets and Italian groceries if you would rather not gather.
- Pick before the flowersThe instruction at the top is the hinge of the whole recipe. Once the plant bolts and blossoms, the leaves turn genuinely bitter and the ribs go fibrous, and no amount of boiling recovers them. Take the flat rosettes of young leaves in early spring.
- The hour is too longAn hour of slow boiling suits old, tough greens rather than young ones. Young leaves need 10 to 20 minutes at a simmer; taste one and stop when the ribs give. Older, sharper leaves may want a change of water partway through, a common way to draw out bitterness.
- Washing "in several waters"This means exactly what it says and is not optional. Dandelion rosettes trap soil at the crown; fill a sink, swish, lift the greens out rather than pouring off, and repeat until no grit settles.
- VolumeGreens collapse to almost nothing. Reckon roughly a pound of untrimmed leaves per two servings, which is a startlingly large pile before it hits the water.
- Draining and dressingPress hard in the colander, or the butter will slide off waterlogged leaves. A squeeze of lemon or a splash of cider vinegar with the butter is a common modern addition and sharpens the flavor, though the recipe itself calls only for butter, salt and pepper.
- With corned beef or hamThe last line means cooking the greens in the pot with the salt meat, as cabbage was. Go easy on added salt in that case, since the pot liquor is already salty.
History: Dandelion greens sit in this book at the tail end of a long tradition of spring "pot herbs" -- the first green things available after a winter of roots, salt meat and preserves, eaten as much for a change of diet as for pleasure. The plant is not native to North America; it traveled with European settlers, who valued it as food and as a bitter tonic, and it naturalized so thoroughly that by the late nineteenth century it was a free crop for anyone with a knife and a basket. The name comes through French dent de lion, lion's tooth, for the jagged leaf. The note about boiling them with corned beef or ham fits Irish and American farmhouse practice, where a pot of salt meat did double duty as cooking liquid for whatever greens the season offered, and it is a reminder that a vegetable chapter of this period still assumed some of its produce would be gathered rather than bought.