Green cheese

When I was a little girl, my mother showed my sister and me the edible "cheeses" of cheese mallow, a rangy, low-growing wildflower.



She and her sister ate them when they were little girls. Their mother and grandmother probably did the same in their own childhoods.



My family wasn't big on foraging for wild foods, but we did pick wild strawberries, and went looking for raspberries and blackberries in season, sometimes going to an old farm and braving a whole field of the prickers to get the fruit. But mostly, snacking on wild stuff was left to the kids (well-trained not to eat anything we didn't know).

I tried wild carrots -- they were kind of tough, but they smelled so good! And we chewed on lavender clover blossoms and red columbine flowers for the nectar. We called the latter honeysuckle, as my mother did; it seemed like an obvious name, since you sucked the honey out of the blossom. I was probably a teenager before I knew the real name.

My mother also showed me "sourgrass" (yellow wood sorrel, Oxalis europaea). That's the delicate shamrock-like plant with little yellow flowers you find growing as a weed in gardens and lawns. I've never been a big fan of sour tastes, so I was never in any danger of overloading on the oxalic acid it contains. Not that I knew about that as a kid.



I found some sourgrass in a friend's garden the other day and had her taste it. Passing on old-timey country lore, I guess.