Edible flowers and shepherd’s purses
The veil of light green over the land is deepening. The bare brown earth is slowly covering itself in its brand new finery, and decking it with fresh blooms of every color.
On the trees, magnolias, peaches, plums and pears are bursting out in frothy swathes of pink and white. At their feet, the new grasses and herbs are sprouting as fast as they can.
My nanny is delighted and she’s out of the house everyday now with a basket on her arm, dogs in tow. She is roaming all over the little woods and parks near our house in suburban Beijing, and she’s stopping to examine every patch of green on every traffic island, too.
Her annual foraging for the first wild herbs and shoots of spring is starting in earnest.
This was all new to me, and I had watched in disbelief in the first years when she came home loaded with a full basket of shepherd’s purse, and started soaking them in water.
After several changes of water, and she was satisfied that the herbs were clean and dirt-free, she blanched them and we made one of the most delicious dumplings I had ever eaten.
It is her spring ritual.
My nanny in Chinese) is from rural Henan, and she was used to the gifts of nature. On her farm, she eked out a living that supported her entire family, and she knew how to harvest the wild herbs of spring to supplement the dinner table.
She joined our family almost 10 years ago, and every year since, she has shared her knowledge of the seasons with me.
The foraging starts at our doorstep, where a little grove of locust trees grow. In spring, the locust blooms, and huge pendulous racemes of creamy flowers hang from the branches. The whole area starts smelling of honey and the bees and other pollinators are quick to arrive.
However, the insects have fierce competition. Our neighbors often pluck off the blooming branches even before the sun has fully risen, much to great indignation.
That is her signal to denude the tree, and she would only leave the upper branches untouched if I am there to remind her.
Why this great enthusiasm for locust flowers? They are edible and nanny is an expert at turning these into pancakes and buns. She washes the flowers, discards the green stems and mixes the buds with fine cornmeal.
The mixture is then steamed over gentle fire and eaten like rice, a fragrant, scented dough that can also be molded into cakes and buns.
All through the warming days, nanny will frequently return from her morning walks with the dogs with bunches of greens which she will carefully soak in water to clean.
To untrained eyes like mine, there is no difference between wild herbs and weeds.
But ayi’s sharp vision picks them out unerringly.
Shepherd’s purse, lambs’ quarters, wild amaranth, mugwort, fiddle heads, bur clover, Indian aster, dandelion, wild garlic, wild onions and chives are the few I can recognize and name from her collections.
Down in the Greater Shanghai hinterland, they love or “grass heads”, the bur clover, a plant that’s related to alfalfa. These are tiny plants that appeal to the delicate palates in this region.
Another popular weed harvested around this time is or Indian aster, a member of the chrysanthemum family. These leafy plants spring up along paddy dykes and ditches and are eagerly foraged. They have started cultivating these, but any chef worth his salt will tell you the wild weeds are best.
Cultivated does not have the signature red stems that chefs look for in the naturally harvested sweet shoots.
They are best cooked in sizzling chicken fat, with pieces of dried tofu added to bulk up the dish.
As we migrate up to the central plains, it’s shepherd’s purse country. All over Henan, the culinary memory is of
An ex-colleague tells me that for him, the taste of home every spring is his mother’s dumplings filled with shepherd’s purse.
Early in the morning, mother would go out to search the hills for this plant, which grows in a distinctive saw-toothed rosette. She would then bring her haul home, wash and blanch it before chopping it up for dumplings.
A platter of fat juicy filled with shepherd’s purse and pork was the only thing that could assuage his homesick stomach.
Shepherd’s purse is also stuffed in soup dumplings or wonton, cooked with noodles, made into various rice cakes or simply dunked in hot pots. It is arguably China’s most delicious weed.