I had a strange fascination with edible plants when I was a kid. I am going to blame it on my father. He would take me out and show me all the plants I could eat and then the ones that could kill me, but there were a few he had no idea about. Every once and a while my mom would take me to the mall in the big city. Usually, I wasn’t allowed to get anything but a pretzel as a reward for watching her try on skorts for hours on end. We would always go to the bookstore on our way out and one time I got lucky and she let me buy a fancy book about edible plants.
I carried this thing around as if it were the first Bible. I read it from front to back and would go outside and identify all of the different plants I could. I think I was really in love with the idea that some wild plants could be eaten more than I was the act of actually eating them. It is comforting knowing if the world ended you would be able to survive like a common ruminant. I could identify the plants, but how do you really know if you got it right or not? I wasn’t one to take chances and didn’t want to keel over dead in my front yard with a half-eaten, poisonous pinecone, in my mouth. I’d find the plants, smell the plants, but never taste them.
My father was all about me learning to live off the land. My mother not so much. Dad loved survival stuff to a point of annoyance. If he had it his way we’d sleep under the stars in a loincloth every night and eat grass clippings for every meal. “Did you know you can eat dandelion and thistle roots?” I did not. I dug a few up and smelled them. They smelled like dirt to me. If I wanted to eat dirt I’d eat beets. No, there wasn’t much about the actual eating of plants that turned me on. That was until I found the recipe section of this book. Cooking plants. That sounds safer. Tastier. I could get behind that.
I found two recipes that I felt confident enough to attempt. One was Sumac Pink Lemonade or Indian Lemonade, the other was for Daylily Fritters. For the lemonade it was simple, I needed to gather some ripe, red, sumac flowers and steep them in a mason jar for a few hours. The flowers would then, as the book said, create something very similar to pink lemonade. Magic.
While the lemonade was steeping I set to work gathering daylilies. I laid waste to all of my mother’s flower beds. I plucked all the petals off and set up a little battering station with eggs in one bowl and flour in the other. It should be noted at this point in my young life I had never cooked anything further than ramen noodles, frying was a tad bit out of my range, but I went in with the confidence of an Iron Chef.
Not sure of what I should use to fry with I asked my Mom. We didn’t have any oil so she told me to use...margarine...no shortage of that. I dunked the petals and threw them in boiling, melted margarine. Blissfully unaware of how long it took to fry something once the petals started sizzling I pulled them out and put them on a paper towel. I must have fried ten pounds of this stuff. When the smoke cleared it smelled like I had melted a bunch of plastic bottles, which is basically what margarine is. I was so proud of my gooey mass of battered flower parts and pieces. I pictured myself on a cookbook. Maybe even having my own cooking show.
I sat down at the table and poured myself a big glass of pink lemonade from the steeping jar of sumac blossoms. I took a bite of my fritters and washed it down with a swig of lemonade. I don’t know what was worse. The greasy, oily, paste of limp flowers or the disgustingly bitter swig of gritty pink water. Probably the lemonade, because in following the directions as literally as possible, I never considered to rinse the blossoms off.
Now, not only did my stomach hurt from the pile of liquid hot plastic and soggy flowers in there but possibly also from the family of spiders I drank which I now saw floating in the jar. I put the book away after this disappointment and started the never-ending search for another childhood fascination. It may be possible to live off the wild in the event of an apocalypse but for now, I’ll stick to the garden and the grocery store.