Dandelion
Salad sprouted in my yard after a warm spring rain. An array of dandelions erupted in the lawn.
Dandelions want to take over the world. It was among the first European plants to invade North America. Even in my old southern suburb where vigilant lawnskeepers uproot every intruder in the greensward with righteous ferocity, there is always a lively plant growing in an obscure corner of the yard. Leave a fragment of root in the soil, it will regenerate. Since it is self fertilizing, it needs no insect intermediaries to propagate. Its seed disbursement system is famous, each seed having a private parasol that can be borne aloft by the breeze or a child blowing the fluff ball. Batonists have estimated that a single dandelion plants generates approximately one thousand seeds.
It is the easiest spring green to forage, and dandelion salad has long been a bracing bowl of freshness. I’ll say something about cultivated dandelion greens shortly, but first the wild. There is a simple rule to follow, the earliest and youngest plants are the tenderest and most cress-like in flavor. Pluck them before the flower forms. You can eat everything fresh but the roots. One old southern treat was to fry the unopened dandelion flower buds in hot bacon fat until they burst. They were also pickled and added to salads. There are tricks to foraging. If the local population of greens tends to be rather too bitter, put the dandelions as soon as possible in cold water. It keeps the flavor fresh. In Appalachia dandelion salad was thought to be a blood tonic. It was sometimes mixed with wood sorrel and green onions in the salad bowl. Italians tend to forage the dandelion as late as the blossom stage, and mix blossom, buds, and leaves with some spring onions, salt, and salad dressing. The twentieth century saw the widespread addition of hard boiled eggs and mandarin orange sections to dandelion salad. Boiled beets were the vegetable most frequently paired with dandelion in restaurant dandelion salads.
I never liked dandelion stalks. The milky latex that seeped from cuts and breaks tasted squirrely to me. But dandelion latex was used in Russia during the two world wars to supply the raw material for rubber. An acre of dandelion could produce forty five lbs of raw rubber.
I’ve never tasted coffee made from roasted dandelion roots. Since I am not a coffee devotee, [tea is my drug of choice] I have avoided all of the coffee substitutes as a matter of principle. I have heard of young roots being peeled and boiled like parsnips in two waters to remove the bitterness. I suspect the only thing that would induce me to go to the effort would be if I discovered some extraordinary medical benefit in it, that is not in other more easily processed parts of the plant.
The roots have long been used in folk medicine in Asia and Europe. Recent studies have indicated important potentials as an anti-diabetic agent. The leaves are famously diuretic. The traditional use of dandelion for gastro-intestinal problems and liver ailments has not been tested by medicinal researchers on human subjects.
Several years ago I devoted a post to the circumstances of the invention of dandelion wine in New England in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
Dandelion greens is a classic southern preparation. The best version uses of pork sidemeat stock in which dandelion leaves are simmered. When they become tender they’re drained and dressed with hot bacon fat and crumble bacon bits. When served, they are sauced with pepper vinegar.
Dandelion soup is a cousin of sorrel soup, a Spring bowl of bracing vegetal verdancy. Some cut the bite of the soup with cream. But why tone down a tonic?
The cultivation of dandelion as a truck crop dates from the mid twentieth century when New Jersey market gardeners began cultivating the French Improved Thick Leaved variety for sale at produce marts and for restaurants in New York City. There was always a Spring demand for greens. In Italian communities a green from the chicory family is frequently sold as “Italian Dandelion.”