An Indian Cucumber Started It All

My three boys on a camping trip last summer. The one who inadvertently found the Indian cucumber is in the middle.

I’ve always found a certain thrill in happening upon a wild-blueberry field atop a mountain or spying a blackberry bush at the edge of a playground. I know I could go to the store, part with a few dollars, and end up with the same amount of food for a fraction of the time and effort, but that would not be nearly so fulfilling. If you’ve ever spent hours picking blueberries and continued to reach for that one more berry – even though it’s getting dark and even starting to rain and the car is a good hour and a half away – then you know exactly what I mean.

Until this past summer, my foraging was almost entirely confined to those plants that just about everybody can recognize: blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries. Then, on a family camping trip, my then-5-year-old showed me a dirty white root he’d pulled out of the ground. It was about the size of his thumb, hairy, and shaped like a miniature, twisted carrot. He had absolutely no idea what it was, but he was chirping excitedly, “Mommy, Mommy, look what I found!”

When I looked at what was in his hand, I got excited, too, because I did know what it was: an Indian cucumber! I had learned about Indian cucumbers on a school trip to Maine in the fifth grade, and from then through my teenage years I would often dig up Indian cucumbers at the edges of yards or while hiking in the woods. The tiny roots taste something like a mild onion but are crisp and refreshing like a cucumber, and they make a wonderful trailside nibble. Somehow, though, I’d stopped finding Indian cucumbers as an adult and had even managed to forget exactly how to identify the plants. In recent years, whenever I tried to dig up the root of a promising-looking speciman, I’d found nothing even resembling what I was looking for. And here my 5-year-old had accomplished it without even intending to! 

Indian cucumbers have two tiers of leaves:
a bottom tier of 5 to 7 leaves and a top tier
of 3 to 5. The plants in this picture haven't
sent up the second tier yet.

We dug up several more Indian cucumbers on that trip, and when I got home I pulled out a book I’d been meaning to read about edible wild plants. I’d picked it up at a used-book store some number of years before and had always intended to study it but had never really even opened it up. I looked up “Indian cucumber” in the index and flipped to the indicated page. There was a single black-and-white drawing and a short paragraph of descriptive text useful only because I was already familiar with the plant. I could immediately tell that I would not want to eat any plant on the sole basis of information found in this book. I thus went onto Amazon’s website and searched for other books about edible wild plants. I found two that got extremely good reviews and ordered both.¹

 I spent the rest of the summer studying my books and examining plants everywhere I went, from my own backyard and the local playground to camping trips and Ultimate Frisbee games. My kids have also become enthusiastic foragers, but nonetheless on more than one occasion they have been heard saying things like, “You don’t need to stop and look at every plant, Mommy!”

In just a few months, I managed to make some exciting identifications, including but by no means limited to mallow “peas” by a barn at a kids’ birthday party; a cattail lateral rhizome at a beach; some black cherries by the side of a highway on a family vacation; wood and sheep sorrel in my backyard; goosefoot  (or wild spinach), purslane, and black nightshade (not the poisonous variety, of course) at a train station; and autumn berries and sumac just about everywhere (we made some delicious jelly out of those – check for details in a future post).

Alas, now it’s winter, the season that tests a forager’s patience. I’ve spent the cold months studying my collection of foraging literature so that I’ll be ready to recognize all the tasty treats that will pop up in the spring. Plants simply cannot be hurried, in winter or any other season, and for most of the year it’s the wrong time to harvest any particular edible plant part. A forager therefore must take the opportunities as they come, but now we’re back to the fact that winter holds few opportunities.

Yet there are still a few, and one of those is wintergreen. I rediscovered wintergreen on a hike with two of my boys recently. I had completely forgotten having been introduced to it as a child, and as we were walking along under the pine trees, as I was scanning the woods for any promising signs that spring might bring delicious bounty to these woods, right there beneath my feet I spotted the shiny oval leaves. I’ve read that wintergreen often keeps its (also tasty) red berries throughout the cold months, but none of the wintergreen we found still had the berries. Nonetheless, the minty aroma that came from gently torn leaves left no doubt about the plant’s identification.

I knew one could make tea from the leaves, but I had no idea how many leaves to use or how long to steep them. We gathered a couple of handfuls and brought them home to compare to pictures and descriptions in several of my foraging books. None of the books mentioned anything about steeping time, so I simmered the leaves for 20 min or so, added sugar, and gave everyone a sample. My 4-year-old was delighted, but he can be counted on to drink just about anything with sugar in it. The tea was a bit too weak for my taste, and later I discovered that one should steep the leaves for a day. Whoops. Well, I guess we’ll be hitting the woods again soon.

¹If you have an interest in this topic, I highly recommend both books, “The Forager’s Harvest” by Samuel Thayer and “From Dirt to Plate” by John Kallas. (Samuel Thayer has now written a second book, “Nature’s Garden,” and that is excellent as well, and he has put out a good DVD based on the first book.) Both books have beautiful color photos – several for each plant – and lengthy descriptions of the plants themselves as well as poisonous or just confusing look-alike species. (As a side note, I’ve since acquired a good beginner’s foraging library, and my initial book, “Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America” by Fernald and Kinsey, is a welcome addition. It has some useful information and covers a lot of plants – it’s just more helpful as a supplement than as the main attraction.)