There was a time not so very long ago when just about everyone made it through the winter on cured meats, stored roots, and canned or dried vegetables. The first wild greens that appeared each spring were avidly sought after and prepared using time-honored procedures. Even in this age of supermarkets and year-round produce, many of us still look forward to locating, harvesting, preparing and chowing down on the real thing.

“A timely mess of wild greens will cure most of what ails you,” one of my great-aunts - a countrywoman who lived into her 90s - used to say.

The gathering of wild greens here in the Blue Ridge began, of course, with the earliest Paleo-Indians who penetrated the region 15,000 or so years ago. They brought with them an extensive knowledge of plants used in other areas and developed a keen eye for the new ones that grew here. Can you imagine, after a long hard winter in a rock-shelter, how they must have anticipated the first tangy spring greens?

Bruce Smith, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, has established that the farming economy of the early North American Indians wasn’t based on maize but on selected wild plants that were maintained in areas adjacent to villages. There was a systematic use of wild greens, gourds, sunflowers, and smartweeds thousands of years before maize was introduced to this continent around 200 A.D. Older members of the Eastern Band of Cherokees still know and use the potherbs their ancestors located here in the Blue Ridge.

“Before there were many cars the old folks used to walk all over the mountains gathering greens,” Cherokee Lucinda Reed told me before her death several years ago. “You can eat off the land all year round if you want to.”

Four of the Cherokee’s favorite wild spring greens (sochan, poke, ramps, and branch lettuce) are discussed in some detail below. But if you attend a community club potluck in the spring on reservation lands, there’s every chance you’ll also have an opportunity to try other potherbs as well. Bean salad (rosy twisted stalk, “Streptopus roseus”), Stacey salad (small-flowered phacelia, “Phacelia dubia”), sweet salad (Solomon’s-seal, “Polygonatum biflorum”), and bear grass spiderwort (“Tradescantia virginiana”) are collected as young plants, cleaned, and then parboiled or fried or both. The early European settlers brought with them - often unknowingly - additional plants like watercress (“Nasturtium officinale”), dock (“Rumex ssp.”), dandelion (“Taraxacum ssp.”), and creasy sallet (“Barbarea verna”) have become spring staples.

By my reckoning, raw or cooked wild greens are to be eaten with vinegar or lemon juice and a helping of buttered cornbread. If you so desire, by all means dish out the steaming greens right on top of the corn bread, butter and pepper liberally, and go to eating.

Branch lettuce (“Saxifraga micranthidifolia”) - sometimes called wild lettuce, bear lettuce, or lettuce saxifrage - grows on wet banks and in seepage areas and streams. Each basal rosette contains several toothed leaves from 4 to 12 inches long. Eat raw with a salad dressing. It’s also good with a little vinegar and chopped onions. To make it really good, drizzle on some hot bacon grease to wilt the greens. The Cherokees often boil and then fry their branch lettuce with ramps.

Poke sallet (“Phytolacca americana”) is also called poke, pokeweed, poke greens, pocan, pigeonberry, and inkberry. It can be found in abundance in open fields and along roadsides. (WARNING: Poke contains several toxic compounds. Never eat poke sallet without first parboiling it at least three times in separate changes of water. Do not include part of the root when collecting. Discard any shoots tinged with red.) Young shoots no more than eight inches long can be prepared in a number of ways: like asparagus; cut and fried golden brown in a cornmeal batter like okra; and fried whole or cut up with scrambled eggs. Young leaves are prepared as a potherb green.

Ramps (“Allium tricoccum”), also called wild leeks, are found growing on rich, wooded slopes in the heart of the Blue Ridge mountains but not in adjacent piedmont areas. It’s sometimes available at roadside stands. Ramps, which belong to the same genus as the domesticated onion, have gained a wide reputation for having a powerful taste and a lingering odor that has discouraged the fainthearted from enjoying this succulent treat. What’s all the fuss about? I find them to be delectable, and anyone who has eaten them recently will likely find them to be pleasingly aromatic. Eat the bulbs raw and see what I mean. Or, cook and mix with other greens or scrambled eggs.

Rubye Alley Bumgarner, a native of Jackson County, offers the following recipe for cheese-scalloped ramps in her “Sunset Farms Cookbook” (revised edition, 1991) for one and one-half quarts of ramps, peeled and cleaned: “Cook ramps in boiling water until tender, about 10 minutes. Drain well and place half the ramps in 2 quart casserole. Add one-half cup of processed cheese and 4 slices of buttered toast. Repeat layers of ramps and cheese. Melt one-half cup margarine, blend in one-half cup enriched flour, stir in 2 cups of milk gradually, cook (stirring constantly) until thick, and salt and pepper. Add this hot mixture to 8 beaten eggs and gradually stir-pour sauce over layers. Top with 4 slices of buttered toast. Bake in 350-degree oven for 30 minutes.”

Sochan (“Rudbeckia laciniatum”), called green-headed coneflower by non-Indians, is one of the most prized spring greens the Cherokees gather. They sometimes call it “sochani.” Many of their gardens have semi-cultivated patches of the plant in protected areas. Closely related to black-eyed Susan (“Rudbeckia hirta”), it grows to 10 feet tall in wet areas and along damp woodland borders. The flower heads that appear in mid-summer are about three inches wide with drooping yellow rays and a center disk (unlike the purple disk of black-eyed Susan) that’s greenish-yellow. The Cherokees recognize sochan as soon as it comes out of the ground in mid-spring by its distinctive irregularly divided leaves and smell. Consult your wildflower field guides for flower and leaf-shape diagrams of green-headed coneflower. Then you will be able to locate the plant this summer along backcountry roadways when it’s in full bloom. Mark the spot and return next spring for greens. Prepare the young shoots and leaves (boiled with several changes of water) have a rich texture and zesty flavor. It’s even good cold as a snack with a little vinegar added. In the opinion of many - this writer included - sochan is the very finest of the traditional potherbs gathered in the Blue Ridge region.

“Before there were many cars the old folks used to walk all over the mountains gathering greens,” Mrs. Reed remembered. “You can eat off the land all year round if you want to. I find sochan mainly along streams. I parboil it and rinse it twice. Then I cook it with fat and eat it just like it is. My husband loves it, but I don’t cook it so much anymore because it sometimes gives me heartburn. If I cooked sochan for him, I’d just have to eat it myself.

“Poke sallet is good, too,” she added. “After you parboil and rinse it, you cook it just like sochan. I always scramble eggs with my poke. You can also quarter the stalk and cook it like fish.

“I prepare ramps pretty much the same way by chopping and adding eggs,” she continued. “A friend of mine ‘wilts’ hers by dropping the entire cleaned plant - bulb, stalk, and leaves - into hot grease so that, when ready, it’s crunchy.” Mrs. Reed refused to pick a favorite traditional spring potherb. “If I had my choice of all of them, I’d just have to take a dab of each,” she remarked. “They’re all good.”

(George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 287713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.)

 

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