Foraging for Dinner

My youngest and eldest sons gathering their dinner. The plants are still pretty small, so the pickings were scarce.

New growth on the sumac in our woods.
This plant was 1 inch high last fall.

Last fall my eldest son discovered a small staghorn sumac bush sprouting in the woods behind our house. Sumac was one of the first edible wild plants we identified last year, and my kids have a particular fondness for it, so having sumac growing on our own property was pretty exciting for him. Not long after this discovery, in his zeal to snip as many things as possible with a pair of clippers I had begrudgingly let him use, he cut it to within an inch of the ground. He realized his error moments later, but of course it was too late. Except it wasn't, because this spring the sumac has somehow managed to get about 3 feet tall already. All I can figure out is that it must have done some growing over the late fall or mild winter. When my son told me the sumac was sprouting, I had to see it for myself before I believed him, even though I know he can identify the fuzzy sumac branches quite well (poison sumac has smooth leaf margins and smooth branches, whereas staghorn sumac has fuzzy branches and toothed leaf margins).

Sumac shoots of a new plant. New
shoots are supposed to be tastier
than shoots growing off existing bushes.

Although we used sumac berries to make many pitchers of sumacade (a tart drink modeled after lemonade) last summer, we haven't tried the shoots yet. When new bushes are growing or old bushes are putting forth new growth, the rapidly growing stalks and branches are tender and juicy rather than hard and woody like the older branches. Late spring and early summer is reportedly the time to look for these, so I wasn't expecting to find the shoots coming out yet. But given the progress of the little sumac bush in our woods, I decided to check out a stand of sumac I had noted at the edge of a parking lot for an athletic field down the road from our house. On the way to the library a couple of days ago, I thus swung by the parking lot and, much to my surprise, found the brush all cleared and two new electric poles in its place. Over the winter someone seems to have erected a building (a warehouse maybe) behind the athletic fields, and these electric poles are no doubt part of the construction project. Only a few smallish sumac branches (they could not really be called bushes yet) were left standing.

Although at first I was dismayed, I soon realized that the construction actually meant good things for our foraging prospects. First of all, there's a good chance that the trucks didn't dig up the sumac roots but just leveled the bushes. A few small shoots I found emerging from the ground offered evidence in support of this theory. Second, disturbed sites are great places to find all sorts of edible plants because seeds that might have been waiting in the soil for years finally have their chance to get close to the surface without encountering competition from well-established neighbors. Sure enough, when I took all three boys on a bike ride to the lot later that afternoon, after my eldest son got home from school, we found lots of plants we could eat.

Lady's thumb. Note the thumbprint-shaped dark spots on the leaves.
These plants will get much larger and produce pretty pink flowers
in the summer.

The most plentiful was lady's thumb, which I had previously seen only in flower (lady's thumb makes droopy pink flowers in the summer) but which I recognized right away by the dark thumbprint-shaped mark on each leaf. Unlike many other edible leaves, those of lady's thumb are worthy of eating during all stages of growth, even when the plant is diverting its energy to flower production. I had tried the leaves last summer and found them to be pretty mild and unobjectionable. I was thus surprised to find that the younger leaves of the non-flowering plant tasted somewhat lemony.

We also found lots of small wild-spinach plants. I spent considerable effort learning to identify wild spinach (also known by a multitude of other names, including goosefoot and lambsquarters) last year. I thought I had found the plant growing in abundance at our local train station, but I wasn't positive enough to eat any until I had seen the flowers and seeds. Unfortunately, by the time flowers and seeds develop, the leaves are no good for eating. I therefore collected the seeds instead, winnowed off the chaff (the papery seed coating that would be a little annoying to eat; I'll provide more info about winnowing in a future post), and cooked the seeds into a quinoa-like hot cereal. The cereal was tasty, but the seed coats were quite hard, which along with the black color made eating the cereal slightly reminiscent of eating fine black sand. If I can perfect my winnowing technique (it needs a lot of perfecting), I plan to experiment further with the seeds. I also collected some seeds to plant in my garden, and I now have tiny sprouts growing. They are nowhere near ready to harvest, though, so I was pleased to find some choice specimens growing down the street. I picked a leaf and prepared for my first taste of wild spinach.

Wild spinach. Yum! Note the white powder
on the leaves, particularly the new growth. You
can rub the powder off with your finger,
and it also makes the leaves water resistant.
An oil-based salad dressing is likely
to slip right off these leaves, so they need
to be mixed with other greens in a salad. You
can use wild spinach in any recipe that calls
for cultivated spinach.

The verdict: much juicier and tastier than cultivated spinach! It's also much smaller, which does make collecting enough for a meal somewhat challenging, but the motivation is high because wild spinach is also one of the most nutritious leafy greens ever analyzed. It has more fiber, vitamin A, vitamin C, potassium, riboflavin, calcium, zinc, copper, and manganese than cultivated spinach. Cultivated spinach does win the prize for omega-3 fatty acids, folic acid, and iron, but nonetheless wild spinach is a worthwhile addition to the diet.

Another plant growing at the edge of the lot was pokeweed, which I wasn't expecting to see because the pokeweed that graces our compost pile every year hadn't made its appearance yet, nor had the pokeweed that lives by our mailbox. I've been wondering what these plants are for years; they make the most interesting, dimpled purplish-black berries that grow together in a long, dramatic droop (called a raceme; click here for detailed drawings and photos of the mature plant from "Wildman" Steve Brill's The Wild Vegan Cookbook). I wanted so badly to know whether I could eat them. Well, the answer is not just "no"; it's "NO, NO, NO!" Eating any part of the pokeweed plant except the young shoots will apparently cause everything on the inside of your body to try to get outside as quickly as possible. The offending toxin is high concentrations of phytolaxin. Here is what Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms, the book that led to my first pokeweed identification, warned: "Entire plant, especially raw berries, highly toxic and potentially fatal. Even young shoots, considered edible by some, should not be used due to the presence of a blood cell altering chemical." That warning was sufficiently terrifying to make me conclude that I had learned as much as I needed to know about pokeweed. After coming across accounts in several other books, however, I've decided that the first book was a bit alarmist.

For example, in Wild Plants I have Known and Eaten, written specifically about Essex county, Massachusetts, foraging expert Russ Cohen titles the seventh chapter "Pokeweed: As American as Apple Pie (and Just as Tasty)." He notes that Pokeweed has been imported to Europe for its edible and ornamental value and says the shoots are "delicious." He points out that plenty of other commonly eaten plants, including rhubarb and potatoes, have highly poisonous parts. So do peach, plum cherry, and apple trees. We eat asparagus shoots, but the berries of the mature plant are inedible (although not nearly as toxic as pokeweed berries). Pokeweed is apparently enjoyed commonly in the South, where the shoots are sold fresh and canned in the supermarkets under the name "poke sallet" or "poke salad" (perhaps some of my Southern readers are familiar with this). Gainesborough, TN, even has an annual poke sallet festival!

Pokeweed shoots growing amidst last year's stalk.
Incidentally, the plant is called pokeweed not because it pokes
above the ground but because its name is derived from the
Algonquin Indian word pokan, which means "dye."
The Algonquins used the ripe berries to dye fabrics and baskets.

Identifying the new shoots is actually pretty easy. The first thing to look for is the dead stalks of last year's plant. These long, hollow, straw-colored stalks sprawl over the ground like a big dead spider. They all emanate from a central root, which is purple and contains the plant's highest concentration of the toxic phytolaxin. Once you've found last year's stalk, which perhaps you've located because you saw the fruiting plant the previous summer, you look for the new shoots in the same area. According to Cohen and other sources, they should be harvested when they are less than a foot (some sources say 8 inches) tall and have no trace of purple anywhere, and cooking them (and discarding the water) will remove any traces of the toxin. The pokeweed we found wasn't tall enough to bother harvesting yet (nor was the sumac), so we'll have to check back a little later. When we do, of course, we'll use caution and consume only a small amount at first, which is good advice no matter what plant you're harvesting.

Wintercress rosette. A wild-spinach plant
is in the top right corner.

We also found some wintercress rosettes, so I tasted a leaf and verified that it was just as bitter as the older plants I tried previously. I'm also fairly certain there were grape vines hanging from some of the trees; the clusters of baby grapes looked just like the ones we found in Missouri.

Now the boys were excited to make our first wild salad. So the next evening we rode our bikes back down the road and collected some lady's thumb, wild spinach, and a few wintercress leaves (which I actually thought made a fine addition to the salad, despite significant skepticism; the only reason I picked any leaves at all was that there wasn't a lot of wild spinach to go around). Back at home, we picked some sheep sorrel, blue violets, and violet leaves. I added some store-bought grape tomatoes and, atop each salad, a single pansy (one of the edible flowers suggested in my book on edible flower gardens). Despite the lack of interesting vegetables to eat with their leafy greens, the boys all cleaned their plates! Salad prep is usually one of my least favorite tasks (I would eat more salad if it weren't for all the prep work), but making this salad was a fun family activity! I do admit that I should probably not have chosen this particular activity on the same night my eldest son had soccer practice, though. By the time the 2-year-old awoke from his nap and we all got down to the end of the road and back, my eldest son and husband had to postpone their dinners and head to practice. But at least they were met with a beautiful and tasty salad when they returned!

My first wild salad, including wild spinach, lady's thumb, wintercress, sheep sorrel, blue and white violets, violet leaves, store-bought grape tomatoes, and a pansy as an edible garnish.

Sheep sorrel growing outside our garden. Note the two small lobes at the base of the largest leaf lobe. Not all sheep sorrel leaves have these extra lobes (which make the leaf look like a fish), but the leaf shape is common enough to be an identifying characteristic.

Sheep sorrel uprooted. Notice varying leaf shapes.