Pokeweed

2020. I had never tried pokeweed before. It is easily identifiable late in the summer, by its huge size (five feet+) and bright blue berries. At that time, though, it’s not good eating. In fact, the berries and roots are always deadly, and the various parts get worse over the summer. The books say to eat the young shoots in the springtime. The problem is, young shoots aren’t so easily identified. But I remembered where it was growning in our yard last fall, and it’s a perennial, so this year I was confident as to which shoots were poke.

Before cooking. Note that the red color is a bad sign. Even some very young shoots were read, though, so I decided to chance it. The biggest of these shoots is perhaps too big.

After cooking. The red has mostly disappeared. So has the unpleasant and distinctive smell, useful in identifying the plant. We used two changes of water, and pretty long boiling (20 minutes each time?). Delicious with salt. Probably ever better with butter and salt too. This is the half we left for the next day, since my wife feared becoming a widow. I was cautious. I only offered them to the rest of the family and the Connell girls an hour after Benjamin and I tried them.

I edited the Wikipedia article for style. It still needs work, in case anybody wants to be useful today. It would also be highly useful to link in some of the web articles on its poisons and cooking that I looked at before cooking it.

May 26: It’s been two days now, with no ill effects. I found a little more and boiled it twice. I intend to try frying it now.

The best reading on Pokeweed is “Can Be Deadly But Oh So Delicious: Poke weed” from around 2013. The comments are an important part of it and of very high quality, though part of that is that I’ve been reading Twitter a lot, where the comments are deplorable. Here’s a highly useful comment: