It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It

by Bill Heavey

  Walking along the river’s edge at a place where little spits of ground jutted out into the main channel, we spooked a fox and watched it run off ahead. “He’s doing the same thing we are,” Paula said. “Huntin’ eggs.” I couldn’t tell which was more striking, Paula’s awareness of what was on the fox’s mind, the notion that we suddenly found ourselves competing with animals for food, as our distant ancestors must have, or Paula’s matter-of-fact tone, suggesting that competing with animals for food was an everyday dynamic that she viewed as anything but remarkable. By the time I’d formulated these thoughts, she’d put fifty more yards between us.

  “Wait up!” I hollered. For once, she did. But only because she’d seen some nesting geese. When I caught up, she started toward them. The geese flushed, honking their protests and awkwardly hoisting themselves into the air when we were still sixty or seventy yards off. “If they flush that early, it means they’re not sitting on eggs,” she said. Had they been sitting on eggs, they’d have held out until we were much closer. A little farther on, she elbowed me and pointed to a Canada that had extended and lowered its long neck, the better to minimize its profile. “Bingo!” she cried. The goose held its ground until we were within ten yards, honking loudly as it left. There were two large, warm eggs in the nest, which was three feet from the water. Bits of goose down and droppings clung to them. “Must be a second lay for them,” she sid. “She didn’t defend it that hard, and usually a goose lays more eggs than two. If high water killed her first lay, she’ll crank out another set. But her heart’s not really in it, you know?” She explained that we needed to candle the eggs, hold them up to a light to see if they were still good. There was a kind of translucence to a good egg, whereas one too far along would look solid. Our only light source was the sun, so that’s what she used. All of this was news to me, but the way she had explained it—the “as everybody but you knows” tone—made me reluctant, for once, to own up to the full extent of my ignorance. If you grow up buying eggs in the dairy case, you don’t have any great incentive to learn to candle them. “Both look good,” she announced. The egg she awarded me was, naturally, the one with more goose crap pasted to it. I was surprised by its size and heft. It was nearly the size of a grapefruit, and heavy. The difference between this and a hen’s egg was amazing, like a rock and a soap bubble. The shell felt thick and tough, as if you could drop it from a fair height without breaking it. I did as Paula had, holding it up to the sun. It looked as solid as a bowling ball to me, but what did I know? Besides, I’d never gotten any further arguing with Paula than I have with Emma. So I didn’t.

  On the way back to the boathouse, Paula let out a little involuntary cry of surprise when she discovered a couple of morels—­ white-ribbed mushrooms three inches tall, looking exactly like the dead leaves they’re surrounded by. She produced a knife and cut them off at the base, and then placed them in a paper sack she’d pulled out of the mysterious blue gym bag that always accompanies her and seems to hold whatever a situation requires.

  Just short of the parking lot she stopped for nettles and dandelion greens, which, as usual, I didn’t notice until I was standing on them. The distance from the printed page of my field guides to the real thing continued to confound me. It was a wonder that anyone ever identified an actual plant from its picture. Peterson’s always showed plants in full flower, by which time virtually all wild edibles were too bitter—if not downright toxic—to eat.

  Back at the boathouse, Paula told me how to prepare my egg. “Wash it real good before you crack it. That shit on the shell’s full of salmonella and God knows what. And the shell itself is hard, calcium, the way an egg’s supposed to be, you know what I’m saying? So you gotta really crack it.” She said I had the makings of a nice omelet. I could sauté the dandelion in butter, or better yet, bacon fat. The nettles should be simmered a few minutes in just enough water to cover them. Simmering quickly neutralized their stinging properties. I could then mix the two greens together in the omelet. She gave me one of the morel mushrooms, explaining that I should slice it and sauté it slowly in butter. I could add it to the omelet as well, but she cautioned that its delicate flavor might be lost among the bitter greens so perhaps I should savor it on its own. And here I encountered another of the many contradictions of Paula. Although she dressed in the most worn and ill-fitting clothes and cussed like a sailor, she could sound like a Junior League luncheon hostess when she talked about food.

  At home, with Emma tucking into a supper of Easy Mac and frozen peas, I found myself unexpectedly warming to my task. I was anticipating an omelet combining fresh and essential tastes: the richness of the goose egg, which I somehow imagined as substantial but not overpowering, paired with the earthiness and bitter tang of the dandelions and offset by some smoky bacon. I was careful not to overcook the greens. Heating a cast-iron pan, I added equal amounts of olive oil and butter so that the butter wouldn’t burn. When it was sizzling, I rapped the egg smartly against the edge of the pan. The eggshell remained unscathed. I rapped harder. Jesus Christ, I wondered, did I need a nightstick to get into this thing? Finally, on the third attempt, I cracked the shell. And sliding out came a surprisingly small slurp of yellow yolk, followed by the blue-gray fetus—so fully formed that the face had an expression of Buddha-like equanimity—of an infant Canada goose.

  I was horrified. The being was about three inches long and had two wings, two tiny webbed feet and a tiny unborn head. It was wet and blue and vivid and I had just fucking killed it. Maybe not—maybe it was already dead. Maybe it wouldn’t have made it. I was in a state of near shock, and before I knew what I was doing, I was sliding it into the sink, out of sight, down the disposal, with the water running full blast as I groped for the switch to turn the motor on to grind it up and flush it away as if doing so fast enough would keep it from ever having existed in the first place. And it was essential that Emma not know, ever. Eyes averted, I hit the wrong switch, turning the kitchen lights off and then back on before I fumblingly found the right one and heard the lethal gargle of the disposal. I ran the water for a long time, until the disposal had long finished grinding and had resumed its normal hum for a full two minutes. Finally I shut it down. And then I staggered to a chair at the table. I was aflame with guilt and remorse. It took me a while to even question why this was affecting me so deeply. It was a goose egg that was further along than you thought, I told myself. You’ve killed geese before, as well as deer, fish, squirrels, wild pigs, elk, and God knows what else. It wasn’t the Johnstown Flood. My daughter, also sitting at the table and picking at the last globs of powdered cheese as if they were the world’s greatest delicacy, did not look up. For which I was thankful beyond all reckoning.

  Half an hour later I called Paula to ask if she had eaten dinner. When she responded in the negative, I gave her the news. “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, you’re killing me. Mine’s probably the same. Ah, shit, I feel really bad about this.” I couldn’t think of anything to say. At last I asked, “So what are you going to do?”

  There was a short silence. “Well, I killed it, so I gotta eat it,” she said, her tone indicating no uncertainty whatsoever, an open-and-shut case. “I’ll just hard-boil it and then slice it up thin so I can’t see what I’m eating so clearly.”

  I was impressed when she said these words, and even more impressed as I pondered them afterward. Paula was an outsider—­someone on the very fringes of society. I think that the possibility that she was crazy crossed my mind when I had first met her, however many years ago that was. And the longer I knew her, the harder she was to cate­gorize. She wasn’t big on the laws enacted by government, but she had a strong and codified sense about right and wrong. When told about the eggs, it hadn’t even occurred to her to question the correct response. I realized what a rare thing this was—first, to have a code at all, and, second, to follow it so unflinchingly. Even when doing so meant eating something like a stillborn gosling.

 
I found that I was running a line from an old Dylan tune—“to live outside the law you must be honest”—through my head over and over. It had come unbidden and I had no idea why.

  And then it hit me. The line had always baffled me. Before I had no context, no clear idea what it referred to. Now I knew. It referred to people like Paula.

  CATTAIL PANCAKES

  ½ cup flour rendered from cattail rhizomes

  1 egg

  ½ to ¾ cup of milk or water

  2 tablespoons melted better or vegetable oil

  1 tablespoon sugar (optional)

  Salt (pinch)

  ¼ teaspoon baking powder

  Maple syrup (for serving the pancakes)

  Dig up 5 lbs cattail rhizomes. Rinse off blood.

  Strip off the outer layers of each rhizome to reveal its core. In a bucket full of water, hold each core under the water and use your fingers to rip apart, shred, and “worry” the plant to separate the resident starch from the cattail root fibers. The starch will sink to the bottom. When you feel that you have worked all the starch from a given piece, discard and start on another rhizome.

  Slowly and gently pour off the water, preserving the slurry of starch on the bottom of the bucket. Spread this out to dry on a tray or cookie sheet (either air dry over several days or speed things up by placing in a 200 degree oven overnight). This should give you approximately a cup of cattail flour. But it usually doesn’t. Either mix in a little regular flour or suck it up and go with whatever you’ve got.

  Mix ½ cup of the cattail flour with a pinch each of baking powder and sald, and the sugar if you’re using it. Beat the egg with ½ cup milk, then add the melted butter or oil. Slowly stir this into the dry mixture until it’s the consistency of pancake batter. Fry tablespoon-sized dollops of batter into silver dollar pancakes. You will have worked hard to arrive at this point and, understandably, will want to sample the finished product. Take a small bite, then toss in garbage pail. You have just proved that, should the grid go down, you could survive on foods like this. Go eat at your favorite restaurant and pray that this doesn’t happen soon.

  Chapter Five:

  Enter the Girl, Sour Cherry Pie, and

  Five Bites of My Own Lawn

  Even though I had given up on die-hard foraging, Hue didn’t appear to hold this against me. Instead, we seemed to have become friends. He continued to visit almost weekly, usually coming after work. He would always pull up fifteen minutes early, his tie wadded up on the seat next to him like something he couldn’t get rid of fast enough. His habit of arriving early baffled me until I recalled that my father, a former navy fighter pilot, had had the same tendency. In the military, being where you were supposed to be when you were supposed to be there wasn’t a matter of courtesy. It was a matter of life and death. And the only way to make sure you were on time was to arrive early. Military service drilled that into you until it was reflexive.

  We still went foraging, though now we’d often spend more time having a beer and talking than actively hunting plants. Hue and I did finally escape my yard, but not before he had identified seventeen edible plants and given me the full rundown on each—the what, when, and how of harvesting, processing, and cooking. One of our first off-site discoveries was a redbud tree near the bike path. We ate its flowers one week and young seedpods the next. Both were lemony and faintly sweet but seemed to lack calories. To me, eating redbud seemed more of a parlor trick—something you did to show off to others—than anything else. Hue quickly set me straight. I was correct about the calorie count, but that wasn’t the whole story. The Indians and early settlers had counted on redbud both as one of the earliest spring edibles and as a needed dose of of vitamins, essential fatty acids, and antioxidants after the long winter. He also said redbud was a good way to “punch up” a salad, which seemed an incongruous manner of speaking for a former infantryman. But Hue was like that, part warrior, part aesthete.

  My favorite discovery with Hue was pokeweed, the young shoots of which he said tasted like asparagus, only better. It grew abundantly along fences and alleys in my neighborhood. The drawback to pokeweed is that only the very early shoots are edible; the roots, seeds, and mature stems and leaves are all “dangerously poisonous,” according to Peterson’s.

  I did some more research to find out what exactly kind of poison we were talking about before I ate any of the stuff. I found a webpage by an associate professor of botany at Palomar College that detailed the toxic compounds in pokeweed: an alkaloid (phytolaccine), a resin (phytolaccatoxin), and a saponin (phytolaccigenin). I don’t know what these are, but they sound like ingredients in “RoundUp Shiva: Destroyer of Weeds.” But the most serious hazard, it claimed, comes from a very toxic plant protein called lectin, which is also found in the castor bean (Ricinus communis) and prayer bead (Abrus precatorius)—the world’s deadliest plants. These lectins happen to be the active ingredient in ricin, the biochemical warfare agent. Yum.

  The new shoots of pokeweed, however, have not yet developed these toxins, and the books emphasized that only shoots newly emerged from the ground, less than six inches tall, were to be eaten. Even so you were supposed to boil them in at least two changes of water for twenty to thirty minutes each. After that much boiling they were safe to eat—and also unappetizingly colorless and slimy. I collected some with Hue one day and cooked them later. I did the two changes of water, but couldn’t bear to see their crisp greenness turning to gray mush and pulled them out after fifteen minutes. With a little butter and salt, they were wonderful, similar to asparagus but with a deeper taste. I felt fine.

  A few days later, I picked, cooked and served some to my mother. It happened that my sister had bought asparagus at the grocery store, so our dinner had a built-in competition between the two vegetables. After sampling each, Mom voted with her fork, helping herself to most of what I had cooked. “They’re delicious,” she said. “Such a ‘green’ taste.” It is a wonderful thing to have someone appreciate a plant you’ve found, picked, and cooked yourself. I decided to spare her the fine print about the dangers of poke. Otherwise, symptoms or not, my mother would have insisted on going to the hospital.

  After I had gathered and enjoyed poke this way three or four times, the weather warmed, the plants shot up overnight, and I had trouble finding “safe” shoots under six inches tall. So I began to push the envelope. After all, the stuff had once been a staple vegetable throughout the American South, where poke “salet” (from the Middle English, for salad, which itself derives from the Vulgar Latin verb “salare,” “to salt”) was traditionally savored as one of the first fresh greens after a winter of salt pork, beans, and corn bread. I bumped the Peterson’s six-inch-maximum rule for shoots to seven inches, then eight. Once again I suffered no ill effects. But that was it. For once, I decided to quit while I was ahead. Eventually I learned it was a good thing I had: a friend described having seen impoverished southerners with what is colloquially known as “poke mouth”—lip sores caused by exposure to the toxic compounds in overly mature poke shoots and leaves.

  One day, Hue mentioned that the previous weekend he’d attended a wild plant walk led by a woman in Baltimore. He thought I should meet her. “She knows a lot about wild edibles and writes a blog about food.” She was also active in Baltimore Food Makers, a group of mostly younger people interested in growing and making their own food, as well as in eating locally and sustainably. He gave me her name and e-mail address, but I was pretty busy at the time. I was still manic about getting the last of the herring before they left the river. When I wasn’t fishing, I was busy screwing up my vegetable garden.

  I made all the standard rookie gardening mistakes, of course. I overwatered, overfertilized, and crowded plants together in the novice’s misguided zeal for maximum production. But I took screwing up more seriously than other beginners. It was as if I had an aptitude for it, an impressively intuitive misunder
standing of gardening. I had, for example, somehow arrived at the opposite of “companion planting,” which is the practice of siting herbs and vegetables that benefit each other side by side. Beans and squash complement each other, for example, because they require different nutrients. Beans have shallow roots, while squash has deep ones, another good combination. And squash tends to crowd out the weeds that frequently bedevil beans. I learned all this afterward. In the meantime, I had unknowingly hit upon “antagonistic gardening,” a concept yet to be recognized in botanical literature. I planted my potatoes next to my beans, in effect inviting them to duke it out for the nutrients both crave. I planted cucumbers and squash next to each other, delighting every pickleworm in the tristate area, who came for the side-by-side convenience of their two favorite vegetables. I was accustomed to the natural world’s vast capacity for indifference, but this was something else entirely. It was as if I’d actively pissed the old girl off. Great patches of my garden seemed to lose hope and went moribund, neither dead nor alive.

  Meanwhile Hue, low-key but insistent, kept after me to call the plant woman. “I just think she’d be a good resource for you,” he said. He mentioned something about her having two small boys and going through a particularly difficult divorce.

  Almost as an afterthought, he added, “She’s a peach.”

  Within the hour, I had e-mailed Michelle Gienow. I took the short and breezy route, a quick note describing my attempt to close the distance between me and what I ate and bemoaning the trying-to-drink-from-a-fire-hose overload of information faced by the novice forager. I closed by saying that Hue—who was a guy I didn’t know particularly well but who obviously knew his plants and had been hugely generous with his time—had suggested I get in touch. A couple of days later, a reply came saying it was nice to hear from a “fellow forager” and that she’d met Hue only a month earlier herself. She was also a fellow freelancer, in both writing and photography. “My main beat is local food and sustainable agriculture,” she wrote, “plus a healthy side order of DIY homesteading stuff.” She had been foraging since early childhood, thanks to a Polish grandmother who had introduced her to wild foods. She wrote that she was committed—on behalf of herself and her two boys—to eating as sustainably, locally, and wildly as possible. Michelle tried to live off the grid to the extent she could, but felt that she’d largely failed at this. She did drive a biodiesel car and tried to shop for clothing for the boys—they were three and seven—in thrift stores and at yard sales, recycling someone else’s still-usable clothing rather than buying new. She said she was “sympathetic” to my project and wanted to know more.