More Free Food

I had my second mess of poke sallet before the end of March.
There's an old saying that poke sallet saved the south after the
end of the Civil War when farmers were destitute, their crops
burned and their smokehouses emptied by union soldiers, with
marauding bands of rogues taking whatever the soldiers missed.

I let a few stalks go to seed, up to six feet tall with magenta stems
and great clusters of dark purple, almost black, berries, and now
there are little green shoots scattered about the lot where my house
burned last year.

Poke is reportedly toxic, so it must be picked early and prepared
correctly in order to be safely eaten. I pick only the smallest, newest
leaves and then parboil them. Let the pot boil for a few minutes after
all the bright green color is gone from the leaves, then pour into a
colander to drain, rinse thoroughly under running water, then return
to the pot to cook in a little fresh water until tender. I'm not sure
how much nutrition is left in the greens after all this- vitamins are
supposedly dissolved in cooking water- but the taste and texture
have been compared to asparagus, and they're safer to eat than
the spinach that sent all those folks to the hospital and killed a few
of them.

My grandmother cut the stalks into pieces, battered and fried
them, said it tasted a little like rhubarb. Fried rhubarb? The
Southern cook considers anything edible a candidate for
battering and frying. Grandma lived into her late '80's.

The berries are supposed to be especially toxic, yet the birds
eat them. The evidence is everywhere in the fall, purple splotches
on the grass and on any uncovered automobiles. It's actually the
seeds that are toxic and they pass through the bird whole,
punctuating the purple splotches.

The juice from the berries has been used as a substitute for ink.
I tried it once with a pen stock and could write very well with it,
but purple writing didn't appeal to me and there was the constant
dipping with the pen.

In her book A Modern Herbal, first published in 1931 and reprinted
by Dover Publications, Mrs. M. Grieve notes that the use of pokeberry
juice to color port wines in Portugal had to be discontinued because it
spoiled the taste. Poke (Phytolacca americana), she wrote, "is regarded
as one of the most important of indigenous American plants", with the
root used as an ingredient in remedies for rheumatism, headaches and
conjunctvitis, also as a "slow emetic and purgative with narcotic
properties," but she warns against an overdose.

Her herbal lore was undoubtedly garnered from the early American
physicians who acquired some of their medicinal knowledge from
Native American healers; poke was highly regarded by those tribal
medicine men.

I had planned to cook one more batch of poke before the leaves
get too large, but the Easter cold snap has killed it back, as well
as frost-blackening the new fig leaves and the lovely mounds of
lemon balm. I covered the garden bed of spinach, it will soon be
ready to pick, and all it cost was the seed at 10 cents per pack
bought at close-out prices last fall. The chickweed has bloomed,
no longer good and tender for salads until there's some new growth.
(It will die back completely during the summer and return to flourish
in the fall and through much of the winter.) But there are plenty of
dandelions, and I can mix some of the greens and flowers with the
spinach. And this summer there will be lots of fleshy orange daylily
flowers to add flavor and color to salads.

There's wild mustard on the Menlo lot, the smallest leaves good in
salads, the larger ones must be mixed with other greens and cooked.
And I have one more ten-cent pack of lettuce to plant.
I'll keep living off the land.