The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [56]
The Wildman now illustrated this point with a musical interlude. “If you eat this, the next thing you’ll be hearing is this—”
He cupped his mouth into a hollow drum and clapped on his cheeks eleven times, patting out the dreadful tune they play in movies when someone has died. The children squealed in delight. Their parents snorted with laughter, none too fazed by the deadly plant. We trod on.
Next we came across a patch of tender-looking greens with distinctly heart-shaped leaves. Here and there, small blue-violet petals decorated their slender stems.
“These are violets,” the Wildman told us. “Violet leaves are great at this time of the year, since they’re very young. They get much thicker and tougher the longer you wait, but now they’re nice and tender. Try,” he said, and picked up a handful to pass around. Everyone bent down and began gathering the leaves.
“You can also eat the flowers, in case you didn’t know. It makes lovely tea. Now, there’s a story about violets,” he said. And the Wildman began a drawn-out tale, told with a true storyteller’s flair: A few years ago, while taking a group on a tour of a park, he met a lady who was particularly interested in everything he said. They kept in touch afterward, and a few months later, they began to court. A full year later, once the violets had begun to sprout again in the spring, they were married. After another year, they gave birth to their beloved daughter and named her Violet, after the very plant we were eating.
The Wildman elaborated on a lot of the plants I had seen on my foraging tour the day before, too. It was a good refresher course for so many of these common weeds. The chickweed, he pointed out, not only was an edible leafy green but made an effective poultice for rashes, or itches caused by bug bites. When its juicy stalks were split, you could rub them directly onto your skin. Even though I didn’t have any itches, I tried it out on my leg. The cooling sensation from the plant’s liquids felt refreshing. He also had some differing thoughts on some of the plants I was becoming familiar with. Dandelions, for instance, were much too bitter in his estimation to eat at this time of year. In March, the leaves were tender enough to eat raw, but now they were thicker, tougher, and more sharply bitter. He recommended cooking them at their present stage.
“Now, does anyone know why they’re called dandelion?” he asked our group. A few guesses from the group later, he provided the rationale: “It translates to ‘tooth of the lion’ in French. Dent de lion. Because of the way the leaves are so sharply serrated.”
One of my favorite discoveries of the day was wild garlic. Its long, slender grasses smelled strongly of onion, hinting at what lay just beneath the earth’s surface. I could remember picking these out of my front lawn as a kid as well. But what I didn’t realize then was that when these were pulled up from the earth slowly and carefully, they retained their small, bulbous roots, which were essentially small, bulbous cloves of miniature garlic. I stuffed a bunch of these into my bag. As they grew fairly rampantly year-round, I had the feeling I might never need to buy garlic again.
We came to a small cluster of spiky brambles near the Boathouse, situated by a scenic pond in the center of the park. We had stopped there initially to break for lunch, and afterward, the Wildman had sighted a black birch tree. The actual tree, not the leaves, turned out to be the draw of this particular plant. He carefully twisted off a small twig and split it in half, so that its young, rubbery bark pulled away from the greenish wood beneath. He sucked on the twig where it had broken.
“Now, can anyone guess what this tastes like?” Brill asked.
A few of us followed and broke off tiny twigs from the tree. Once I put it to my mouth, I immediately sensed a very familiar taste. My first thought was chewing gum—some type of mint. Then, on further thought, I guessed it was more like root beer.
“Sassafras!” I said aloud, naming the root that the popular drink’s flavor