When my down-the-road neighbor Lydia Rolerson was a child, there were lots of dandelions on our island, many more than today. Land had been cleared for agriculture, so there were expanses of grass where dandelions could poke their sawtoothed leaves out of the ground as soon as it warmed enough to encourage growth. And when they did come up, there were Lydia and her sisters, ready and waiting with a knife in one hand and bag in another to cut them out quickly before they bloomed to take home to their mother who would cook up a big mess of them. Even now Lydia has fond recollections of dandelion greens.
So do nonagenarian Charlie Tilden and octogenarian Mary Hall. “Cripes, them are good eating,” says Charlie. Mary says, “I love them, I can taste them right now.” “Oh, I’d love a mess of dandelions, there just aren’t many anymore.” says Lydia.
We have more woods than fields now, more deer than dandelions.
There is little question that they are good for you. My mom used to dig at least one batch for us when I was a little kid. It was a spring tonic, “good for ails you,” she said, though she didn’t specify what it was we ailed from. According to one nutrient chart I found for dandelions, it would appear that one cup of raw greens has 25 calories, 5 grams of carbohydrates, and 2 grams of dietary fiber. In the vitamin and mineral department, based on a diet of 2000 calories a day, that’s 9 percent of the iron we are supposed to have daily 10 percent of the calcium, 32 percent of vitamin C, and a walloping 54 percent of vitamin A.
Dandelion salad is all right, maybe if you marinate it in a nice salad dressing for a while. Most of the time we ate them boiled. I wish I could say I enjoyed them then, but I didn’t and so don’t have the kind of memory required to motivate me to spend a couple hours bent over cutting dandelions out of the ground. Maybe it’s because of how mom fixed them.
Some folks earlier in the 20th century used to layer dandelions in crocks with salt, and soaking and rinsing them when it was time to cook them. Lydia says her mother-in-law used to do that, then she wrinkles her nose and shakes her head, “I don’t like them salted.”
Other folks canned up a big batch to have in the winter as a bit of variety from the turnips, carrots, potatoes, and beets many folks grew and stored, the canned tomatoes and cucumber pickles. Charlie remembered his neighbor Bessie Coombs getting dandelions by the washtub-ful: “They grew real thick up there,” he said. Then she’d soak them out and put them up in canning jars, enough to last all winter.
Many of the old timers cooked the greens with a nice square, or as Lydia said, a “junk” of lean salt pork. Mary said that the best salt pork was thick, say three or four inches thick, and brined not dry salted. (Southerners and Midwesterners still cook collards, greens, green beans and so on with salt pork; we Yankees used to, but then forgot how.) Mary, Lydia and Charlie all recalled seeing potatoes added to the pot of dandelions whereupon they turned green. Then you ate the whole thing for dinner or supper with butter, or vinegar if you liked it, and bread or biscuits.
Certainly part of the secret to good dandelion greens is getting them when they are young, before they have bloomed, before mid-May — though, Mary said, you can pick older ones if you parboil and throw the water off once before the final boiling. She said she’d sometimes pick the bud out of the center and eat it uncooked.
Suppose they bloom. You know that you can make wine out of the blossoms. Pick them early in the day before they bloom fully; that way you can collect more of them in your container. Charlie remembered his mother made it but he never saw how. Never mind, it is the result that matters, “Oh, it’s damn good,” he said, “I drank a lot of it but I never made it.”
As for the present relative dearth of dandelions, despite whatever those people say who rush around their yards with poison to spray them, here is a solution. Mary recalled her mother gathering dandelion seed heads and saving them to spread over her vegetable garden in the fall when it was finally done for the season. The little dandelions would sprout up in the spring before it was time to plant out vegetables, and so there they were, Mary reported, “my mother’s own private dandelion patch.”
Sandy Oliver cooks and writes on Islesboro.