EnJOY Real Food - Tillie's Verdolago Salad

Hilda Joy
Originally Published 6/28/19
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​Many years ago, I read a magazine article entitled In Defense of Stinginess, clipped it, and pasted it into an album I had started of words I wanted to reread.  The premise of the article is that we benefit from making things ourselves and primarily we benefit by foraging for food.  When we moved from an apartment to two acres Northwest of Chicago, I finally had the opportunity to start foraging.  Our property abutted an abandoned railroad right of way that had been built to assist dairy farmers in two counties to move milk to market.  Though rails and ties had been removed, occasionally a spike would appear.  This narrow-wooded area was home to a host of wild foods.

This was about the time that Euell Gibbons published Stalking the Wild Asparagus and other books about looking for wild foods.  Spying a few stalks of wild asparagus growing under a river birch in our front yard, I immediately bought this book, which became a food bible of sorts.  Other teachers were neighbors, friends who grew up in rural environments, and the landscape architect who was charged with laying out the path of a paved bike path through the right of way.

Soon, I was finding and utilizing chokecherry, elderberry, red sumac, raspberries, both red and black, chicory, dandelion, day lilies, ground cherries, wild onion, wild grapes, and, most flavorful of all, wild strawberries.  In retrospect, I realize I bypassed plants.  One of my daughters once said, “If I have children, I shall send them to you so they can eat things like day lily buds, which you say taste much like green beans when steamed, buttered, and salt-and-peppered.”  The local forest preserve provided us with black walnuts and hickory nuts and, when springs freshened, watercress for a short time.  Our property was planted with many fruit trees:  apple, apricot, peach, pear, plum, crabapple; there were also five long rows of Concord grapes.  We were blessed.

Tillie and Martin Bode

In New Mexico, I am finally learning to forage for wild foods, having in Spring been taken on a hunt for chimija and just recently being given a large haul of wild spinach—aka, lamb’s quarters and pigweed—so I could cook delicious quelites.  A friend promises me he will soon help me find sorrel along the Abiquiu roadsides.  This summer, I shall dig up chicory root and roast it to add to coffee.  Right now, I am expecting a windfall of verdolaga, most of which shall be cooked in the local style with bacon and onions.  Some of it will definitely go into the Bode family recipe for verdolaga salad.  I hope our readers will try this salad.  If so, please let me know.

Verdolaga Salad
 
This unusual salad is a favorite of the family of Martin Bode, prominent Abiquiu merchant.  Verdolaga (purslane in English) is a succulent that appears in Northern New Mexico gardens starting in June.  Now usually considered a weed, this nutritious plant was once cultivated in American gardens for culinary and medicinal use.  Verdolaga is a rich source of Vitamins A and C and also of riboflavin and especially of iron.  This is Tillie (Mrs. Martin) Bode’s recipe.

​Ingredients
​1 large onion, diced
1 can oil-packed sardines
several handfuls of verdolaga
salt/pepper
white vinegar
​optional:
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
juice of 1 lemon
 

• ​Place diced onion in the bottom of a large bowl.
• Salt/pepper onion to taste, stirring well.
• Sprinkle seasoned onion with vinegar, stirring again.
• ​Empty contents of can, including oil, onto the onion, mashing vigorously to combine sardines with onion.
• Prepare verdolaga by cutting off roots and coarse stems.  Soak verdolaga in a generous quantity of water; rinse off sandy grit; repeat as necessary.  Dry on paper toweling.
• ​Chop verdolaga and add it to onion-and-sardine mixture, tossing salad thoroughly.
• ​While Tillie Bode’s recipe does not include mustard and lemon juice, their addition enhances this peppy and very healthy salad.

 
EnJoy