by Ben Becker, Newsletter Writer
For most of human history, we’ve emerged from the winter hungry for the first edible plants to spring from the warming soil. Our cold-season stockpile exhausted, we return to the outdoors ready for fresh, nutritious food. Even in the anachronistic present, when we’re able to eat more or less what we want all year, the spring produce coming in from local farms feels like a fleeting gift, both delicate and powerful. It’s food that nourishes us profoundly while deepening our connection to time and place.
Most spring produce is essentially or fully wild. Wild plants and fungi are well-adapted to our climate, taking early advantage of increasing warmth, light, and water, bursting from the ground well before the trees leaf out and fussier cultivated plants begin to grow. Wild plants know how to extract maximum nutrition from any soil, and we share in the resilience of their wildness when we take them into our bodies.
Spring produce tastes and feels cleansing. It helps us detoxify, and supports strong health through essential phytochemistry. Accepting the gifts of the ground, we shed the weight of winter, lightening our steps, brightening our eyes, and preparing for the year to come. Let’s meet some of the characters populating the theater of renewal on the shelves of our Co-op’s Produce section.
ARUGULA AND WATERCRESS
Spring is by far the best time for spicy, delicate arugula. Unlike lettuce, arugula has remained almost unchanged from its wild form. Generally eaten in salads or on sandwiches, arugula, like other cruciferous green vegetables (broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts, and many more), has been well-studied for its anti-cancer benefits, and it particularly shines when it comes to essential micronutrients like vitamins A and K.
Watercress (another crucifer) grows densely in spring-fed streams throughout the cool months of the year, flourishing from the time the snow begins to melt until the summer gets hot. Its peppery flavor is a bit similar to arugula’s, but quite distinct, and it scores even higher nutritionally. Watercress is delicious raw, and is also often eaten stir-fried or as the main ingredient in soups. Because our supply comes from local farmers who, later in the season, are too busy to spend a lot of time gathering food in the woods, wild watercress is only available in stores during this season.
MORELS
For many people, nothing exceeds the ephemeral morel in flavor. The mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of mycelia (the underground filaments of fungi) that feed on the roots of standing dead trees, especially elms. Morels start showing up sometime in April, and their season can last from a few weeks to a couple of months. Around here they come in two major varieties—the earlier black and the later yellow morels—and many people prefer the black ones.
Like almost all mushrooms, morels need to be cooked. Halve them lengthwise, soak briefly in salted water to remove any bugs, dry them well, and then saute them in butter until they give up all their moisture and turn golden and a little chewy. Morels are great eaten on their own, or in any simple preparation (on toast, with eggs, on pasta, or in other dishes that don’t dilute or overpower their unique taste). They can be preserved by drying, or by cooking in a lot of butter and freezing them; a creamy soup, full of intense mushroom flavor, is a magnificent way to enjoy morels in the winter when they’re preserved this way.
RAMPS (AND COUSINS)
Ramps are one of the true joys of spring. Just as the maples begin to bud, and the nights no longer dip below freezing, the shoots of these perennial wild leeks emerge. In some places they carpet the forest floor by mid-April; such patches are likely the traces of management by indigenous people, for whom ramps have long been an important food. We owe any abundance of this fleeting perennial to traditional practices that have nudged nature in directions that benefit humans while respecting the needs of other beings.
Ancestral ecological knowledge doesn’t always survive “civilization.” With the recent popularity of wild ingredients on restaurant menus, commercial digging of ramps has come to threaten the existence of many colonies (it takes six or seven years for each individual plant to reach maturity, making wild leeks very vulnerable to overharvest). Fortunately, the ramps on the shelves at the Co-op come from the private land of farmers who understand how much to take from a given patch, and how to practice methods that can actually benefit the population—so we can enjoy their flavor with a good conscience.
Speaking of flavor, wild leeks are incomparable. Somewhere between garlic greens and scallions, with a subtle lemony undertone, they clearly belong with their cultivated cousins in the allium family (leeks, shallots, garlic, and onions). Both bulbs and leaves are delicious chopped raw to garnish soups, salads, eggs, mushrooms, or fish. Cooking tames the garlic flavor, while pickling or lacto-fermenting the bulbs brings out the citrus aspect.
Ramps are also highly nutritious. They offer plenty of vitamins C and K, among others, and are high in manganese and iron. They’re great sources of antioxidants, choline (which supports cognitive function), folates (to strengthen the circulatory system) and other beneficial phytochemicals. Somewhat comparable benefits and flavors come with the delectable spring onions, garlic greens and scapes we also start to see on the produce shelves at this time of year—but wild leeks are something special, a gift of the wild, and of humans who’ve known how to work with wildness.
RADISHES
Probably the most domesticated among our cast of characters, the radish is still pretty close to its origins. Cultivated radishes simply have a larger and more palatable root than their wild cousins. Radishes are one of the first farm and garden plants of the year; they grow quickly, their roots opening up the soil for subsequent crops planted on the same site.
Depending on which Willy Street Co-op site you visit, you may find a couple of uncommon radish varieties coming from our local farms. Look for the beautiful, multicolored Easter Egg radishes, or the longer and (usually) milder French Breakfast variety. We may also still have some local Beauty Hearts, a gorgeous storage radish with less pronounced heat than standard red types.
Real radish fans often enjoy munching on whole radishes dipped in salt. The more moderate among us slice them thinly and add them to salads and sandwiches. Halved and braised in butter and a little stock, radishes take on a sweetness nearly undetectable in their raw form. This is also the time to eat radish greens, which are usually too damaged to bother with on the bunches shipped to us later in the year. Radish leaves make an excellent cooked green, sautéed the way you might cook spinach, but with a more delicate texture.
As yet another Brassica, radishes help cleanse the body of carcinogens and strengthen its antitumor activity. They’re also a natural antifungal, effective against yeast infections. High in vitamin C and fiber, radishes deserve a place in our spring pharmacopoeia of health-promoting plant foods.
ASPARAGUS
We all know asparagus, and it’s easy to take it for granted. For those of us who eat seasonally, though, this edible shoot of an essentially wild plant is another spring treasure—and there’s more to do with it than we can usually fit into its comparatively long local season. Good raw, steamed, roasted, or pickled, with butter and salt, hollandaise sauce, orange and lemon juice, or in cream soups, easy-to-prepare asparagus accompanies many dishes perfectly.
Asparagus is a perennial plant, returning for a number of years once established. Perennial foods don’t require repeated cultivation, and that makes for healthier, less disturbed soil. The deep roots of perennials form partnerships with beneficial microbes and fungi, increasing water penetration and reducing erosion. Unfortunately, the carbon footprint of out-of-season shipment of asparagus from other regions far outweighs those benefits. Eating local asparagus, on the other hand, feeds our land, our local food economies, and our bodies—all things that make it even more special.
RHUBARB
Rhubarb is familiar to us mostly as a sauce, or as an ingredient in strawberry-rhubarb pie; it’s likely that any handed-down box of recipe cards or church cookbook in the U.S. contains somebody’s variation on these two sweet-tart classics. Rhubarb stalks have only been widely eaten since about the late 18th Century. Prior to that, its dried root was imported as an expensive spice from China, where it had long been employed medicinally. Like many members of the buckwheat family, rhubarb is high in oxalic acid, which can bind with calcium and make it unavailable to our bodies. There’s a lot of calcium in rhubarb, and cooking the stalks reduces oxalic acid to make this essential nutrient available to us. It’s a great source of vitamins C and K and of manganese as well, and, as another perennial, can benefit the soil—all good reasons to keep up the spring tradition of eating rhubarb.
DANDELION GREENS
The terror of lawn-obsessed suburbanites, dandelion’s resilience perfectly matches its vibrant flavor and health-promoting properties. Very bitter by summer, our local, early-season dandelion greens are significantly milder. Dandelion (a member of the immense aster family) is extremely high in a suite of vitamins and minerals, and clearly supports our bodies in some very important ways.
Dandelion greens may have powerful anti-tumor, antiviral and antibacterial properties. Like other bitter edibles, they’ve shown promise for supporting liver function and slowing carbohydrate digestion, which translates to more regular insulin levels. The root is being studied for its ability to help our digestive tract and immune system recover from widespread everyday exposure to herbicides, and the greens most likely provide some of the same benefits. It’s clear that dandelion packs serious nutritional wallop.
When properly prepared, even very bitter greens can provide an incredibly rich range of flavors. Five minutes of boiling, followed by draining and frying with bacon or butter and salt, yields a great side dish. Mixed raw with other, milder or spicier greens, dandelion lends variety to a spring salad. Milder leaves make a truly amazing pesto, pureed with high-quality oil and a little hard cheese, with pine nuts or sunflower seeds mixed in after blending. Switching up the greens we eat throughout the year brings us definite benefits in health and pleasure; this is the time to bring dandelion into your kitchen, if it hasn’t already insidiously crept its way in from the yard or garden.
THE SPRING PALETTE
Compared to the cornucopia of the fall harvest, local spring options are limited—but that’s part of the fun. This is the time of year to compose delicious, simple meals based on a handful of elements, each featuring a distinctive sharp, bitter, earthy, or sour flavor that stands out wonderfully in different combinations. A breakfast of eggs with sautéed ramp bulbs, asparagus, and the first local feta cheese of the year, followed by yogurt with rhubarb sauce; for lunch, a spring salad, with the distinct punches of watercress, arugula, radishes and raw wild leek greens; brook trout for dinner, sprinkled with chopped ramps, alongside a serving of morels and a soup of boiled and pureed dandelion greens, finished with some good local sunflower oil—any combination of these ingredients is hard to beat.
Good food is good medicine, for the spirit as well as the body. All the green on this palette makes for particularly potent medicine, at just the time we need it—and there’s great variety here as well, in the range of micronutrients and phytochemistry that come with different plant and fungal families. We can be grateful throughout the year for the hard work of the people who grow our food; spring is the time to also give thanks for the free gifts of the earth, and to get back in touch with natural cycles, tapping into the web of life through the food we treasure.