foraging – C-VILLE Weekly

Food that’s free: Plants to forage in this strangest spring

Years ago, in the spring, I was out for a run in a rural spot and encountered an elderly man who told me he was hunting “dryland cress”—an edible plant. I was enchanted; it was like he’d stepped from the pages of that 1973 Foxfire volume on my shelf, in which Appalachian old-timers shared secrets of wild foods—plants with fabulous names like kedlick and warlock. Foods that never darken the door of a supermarket.

Though I was intrigued, I had nary a clue about how to acquire such knowledge. I did have an amateur interest in plants, though, which surged every spring. I like tracking when trees and wildflowers bloom, and each year I’ve tried to learn a few more plants’ names, whether native ephemeral flowers or hardy weeds in the lawn. Inevitably, the question of which ones are edible has become part of that learning curve.

In this strangest of springs, with the acquisition of groceries having suddenly become a worrisome, uncertain undertaking, foraging wild food takes on new immediacy. The situation neatly illustrates how dependent we’ve been on human systems for our food. In winter, if I wanted fresh salad greens, I bought them from the store. But now we’re trying not to shop more than once every two weeks. And even if a tub of greens lasted two weeks in the fridge, which it won’t, I can’t count on getting that tub in the first place. The last time we ordered groceries for curbside pickup, a third of the items we chose weren’t available. Along with our brown bags, we received a list of all the stuff we couldn’t have and would just have to do without.

It’s wonderful that the local food economy is still finding ways to connect eaters with farmers, but that system too has its limitations, and its risks—largely because of a lack of coherent guidance about how to safely conduct business. And for those who have lost their livelihoods, of course, there’s another, much deeper layer of worry around the task of putting food on the table.

Amidst all this, plants we can eat are busy growing in the yard, in the woods, and on the edges of fields. Even as nature presents one of its most frightening aspects in the form of the virus itself, it is also quietly offering sustenance and nourishment that is independent of those fragile, flawed human food systems. At my house, we’ve been eating more wild foods this year than ever before. I still don’t possess esoteric folk wisdom about plants, and most of our calories still come from the store. But I’ve read about foraging and talked with knowledgeable people and have learned, to my delight, that foraging food can be very simple, even convenient.

The best lesson was that many ubiquitous weeds, things that just about everyone can identify, are edible. Violets and dandelions both have edible greens and flowers. Those redbud trees blooming everywhere you look? You can eat their flowers, too. Voila: a lovely salad, fresh and free. A little later in spring, lambs’ quarters appear—also known, for good reason, as wild spinach.

Next we learned to identify chickweed and garlic mustard, both very common and useful. Someone mentioned chickweed pesto; my mind opened further. I heard we could drink tea from white pine needles. A friend taught me to recognize spicebush, to nibble its flowers and make tea from its twigs. It seemed like one of those closely guarded secrets at the time, but I soon realized spicebush is an extremely widespread plant in our local forests.

I got a book—John Kallas’ Edible Wild Plants—and it revealed instructions for both the labor-intensive (making your own marshmallows from, well, mallow plants) and the beautifully easy (using oxeye daisy flowers as a garnish). With my kids, I read the classic My Side of the Mountain, in which a boy learns to live in the Catskills with almost total self-sufficiency: a little fanciful, but somehow reassuring, too.

My latest inspiration is an Instagram account, @mallorylodonnell, which daily supplies me with amazing new ideas (like sautéed hosta shoots). As with any wild-food information, I’ll verify these tips with other sources before I try them myself, but the empowering takeaway is that food is everywhere—taking so many more forms than we’ve been trained to believe by the standard grocery-store selection.

Also, deep forests aren’t required for successful foraging—even of gourmet delicacies. I’ve had more time than ever before for hunting morel mushrooms this spring, and I have put in my hours walking in the woods. But the only morels we’ve actually found were growing right behind our mailbox. Cooked gently in butter, with a splash of cream, they were divine: a real gift from the ground.

The figs of Fifeville: The neighborhood’s secret bounty ripens in the summer heat

My first intoxicating taste of a freshly picked fig took place in the formal garden at Villa Vignamaggio, in Tuscany. Frozen in Renaissance times, the setting had a surreal beauty to it, the kind you see in period pieces—like 1993’s Much Ado About Nothing, which was filmed at Vignamaggio. The villa’s owner, a lawyer from Rome, reached up into the tree, plucked a ripe fruit, and asked, “Would you like a fig?”

Following his example, I held the stem with my fingertips and bit into the flesh of the green-skinned bulb. I had grown up on Fig Newtons, with their chalky pastry wrapped around a too-sweet gummy filling, and I had sampled figs in fancy New York restaurants, usually with a bit of goat cheese and a balsamic-vinegar reduction. But the musk-and-honey flavor that filled my mouth at Vignamaggio made my eyes roll back in my head. I knew the experience could never be replicated. I feared no fig would ever taste as good.

Then I came to Charlottesville. And on a typically steamy summer day, I sat with my sister on the back porch of her house in Fifeville, drinking cold white wine in the hot air.

“Wanna go pick some figs?” she asked.

“Where, in Italy?” I replied.

“Nope,” she said. “Right up the street.”

I took the last swig from my glass, my sister grabbed a little wire basket, and within minutes we were gently pulling soft little orbs from the branches of a sprawling tree near the corner of Fifth and West Main streets. I looked around furtively, afraid that we’d be arrested. Even though the tree stood on the property of a shuttered restaurant, the angel on my shoulder told me we were trespassing and stealing.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Just pick.”

As I have discovered since then, fig trees thrive in Fifeville. The one near Fifth and Main became a popular community resource, but the owners of Little Star removed it last year because it was crowding their outdoor dining space (bummer). Walk along Fifth, Dice, Sixth, Sixth-and-a-Half, and Seventh streets, and you will see at least a dozen fig trees, tucked up against houses, looming by sidewalks, peeking over fence tops. Out of public view, in residents’ yards, even more figs grow. In mid-July most of the fruit is green, hard, and no bigger than your thumb. But as July stretches into August, the figs swell and ripen—the green skin showing a little purple—and the Fifeville fig harvest commences.

Devin Floyd, founder and director of Charlottesville’s Center for Urban Habitats, confirms that the fruit trees thrive in certain pockets of the city, including Fifeville and Belmont, where “marginally Mediterranean” growing conditions exist. This may be because of the sparse shade and sloping terrain, which drains well. “[Fig trees] need a dry and hot microclimate to do best,” Floyd wrote in an email. “I planted one in a south-facing lawn in Belmont. Ten years later, it is still kicking.”

Floyd is quick to point out that figs are a non-native species. Many sources cite California as the birthplace of the fig industry in America, but the fruit’s history there is rocky. In 1881, thousands of cuttings of the Smyrna variety were imported to the Golden State from Turkey. However, the trees bore no fruit until 1899, when the fig wasp, shipped in from the Middle East, performed the pollination that the Smyrna requires in order to produce.

Meanwhile, in Charlottesville, figs were already growing, thanks to—you guessed it—Thomas Jefferson. Touring the south of France in 1787, he wrote, “The most delicate figs known in Europe are those growing about this place.” Two years later, he received and planted 44 cuttings from France—including the Marseilles variety, which is the most common in Fifeville and does not require pollination by a wasp to bear fruit. Through sharing with local and out-of-state friends, Jefferson became the Johnny Apple Seed of figs.

Having collected about five pounds of fruit from the Fifth Street tree, my sister and I scurried home. She pulled a disc of Pillsbury pie dough from the refrigerator and set it on a cookie sheet. She smeared the dough with several tablespoons of apricot preserves (she said she sometimes uses lemon curd, instead), cut the figs into quarters, and arranged them in concentric circles atop the jam. After crimping the edges of the dough, she baked the galette (oh, so French!), and mouth-watering aromas wafted out of the kitchen.

The experience was unexpectedly moving. My body was in Fifeville, but my mind traveled to a villa in Tuscany.

Fig trees thrive in certain pockets of the city, including Fifeville and Belmont, where “marginally Mediterranean” growing conditions exist.

Through sharing with local and out-of-state friends, Jefferson became the Johnny Apple Seed of figs.