A WEED BY ANY OTHER NAME

This story was created by our partners at the Heavy Table, a weekly culinary newsletter dedicated to covering the best food and drink of the Upper Midwest. Back them on Patreon to receive four distinct email newsletters focused on dining, the restaurant business, spirits, and home cooking: http://www.patreon.com/heavytable

This week’s lead recipe, a method for harvesting and baking dandelion flowers, arrived in my inbox out of the blue but very much in keeping with the season (late spring) and the mood (in need of some sunshine.) I’ve been writing about, researching, and cooking food professionally for nearly 20 years at this point and I am still regularly surprised by entirely new ingredients and combinations that bring entirely fresh flavors and ideas to the table. The dandelion thing is a new one.

Or rather: It’s an old one?

Author Wendy Makoons Geniusz (whose book Plants Have So Much To Give Us, co-written with her mother) brings deep knowledge of Ojibwe foodways into her writing. And that knowledge, in turn, has a tendency to show us flavors and concepts that would never occur to us, as we tumble around our vacuum-sealed ecosystems of white sugar, bleached flour, and mass-manufactured snacks. 

Collectively we exterminate dandelions on sight, often with the use of chemicals that have horrible knock-on effects for the environment as a whole. What this recipe presupposes is: Maybe we shouldn’t? — James Norton

IN DEFENSE OF DANDELIONS
Indigenous food traditions can bring seasonal sunshine to your dinner plate.
By Wendy Makoons Geniusz

Annmarie Geniusz / Heavy Table

We are approaching the time of year when yards, fields, and other stretches of grass are covered with delicate, scalloped, yellow disks spread out between thin green lines of grass.  To some people, this sight represents beauty.  To some people, this sight represents the failure of not properly treating with herbicide. For others, this sight is a mouth-watering food potential.  

My mother’s favorite flowers were dandelions.  She loved nothing better than to be brought a handful of dandelions on an early summer’s day. Putting them in one of her prettiest vases, proudly displaying them on her kitchen table, she would declare that she much preferred dandelions to the florist’s most expensive bouquet.

My mother had long been upset by her neighbors dumping gallons of toxic herbicides on their lawns to kill the little golden flowers she so adored. When she began revitalizing our Indigenous culture within our family, and discovered that Doodooshaaboojiibik, ‘Milk Root,’ (one Ojibwe name for Dandelion) was a very important medicine, her rage at this atrocity grew.

When her teacher, Keewaydinoquay Peschel, an Anishinaabe medicine woman and ethnobotanist from Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula, taught her about these medicines and taught her how to cook with dandelions, our dandelion bouquets started turning into dinner.  One time a grade school teacher accused me of lying when I told her that for dinner the previous evening my family had eaten dandelions and snowballs. (The latter being white rice shaped into spheres). My mother, deeply offended that one of her children should be falsely accused of anything, went to speak to that teacher the next day.  

My favorite childhood dandelion recipe was one my mother called “Little Suns,” cornmeal coated, fried dandelion flowers.  I later learned that this name and recipe came from Keewaydinoquay. My mother wrote about dandelions and shared this recipe in her book Plants Have So Much To Give Us.  

Annmarie Geniusz / Heavy Table

I have not made any of my mother’s dandelion recipes for years, but my sister, Annmarie Geniusz, not only makes them frequently, she has also improved upon them.  This week, my sister’s Duluth yard was full of bright yellow dandelions, so we decided to make “Little Suns.” My sister bakes, rather than fries, the coated dandelions. She also adds seasoning salt to bring out the flower’s taste. She stresses that washing out the “milky” part, which gives this flower its Ojibwe name, from the green stem is more important than removing all of the green part. (My mother’s instructions for cooking with dandelions stressed the importance of taking off all of the green part of the stem from the back of the flower).  

We filled a cookie sheet with about twenty-four “Little Suns.”  Biting into the “Little Suns,” my teeth bit through a hard crust of slightly salty cornmeal and landed into a soft bed of delicate, thin, pollen flavored petals, which tasted just like “sunshine.”  

Note: Knowing that there are readers of Heavy Table who enjoy making the recipes in our mother’s book, we thought that they might appreciate my sister’s version of “Little Suns.”  Since dandelions are just starting to cover our yards in Minnesota and Wisconsin, we thought this would be a timely article to share with everyone.  

Annmarie Geniusz / Heavy Table

‘LITTLE SUNS’

24 dandelion flowers
½ tsp seasoning salt (we recommend Penzey’s)
¾ cup cornmeal1 egg (beaten)
3 Tbsp butter cut into 9 slices

When gathering the flowers, our culture says to ask the plant for his/her flower and to promise that you will leave some flowers so the plant can keep living in that spot.

Preheat oven to 375 F. Process the flowers by cutting off the stems, then washing the back of the flower, where the stem was connected, to get out all of the “milk.”  You should also wash the yellow flower part to get out any sand or grit.

Set the flowers aside on a clean surface

Put the beaten egg into one bowl. Combine the cornmeal and seasoning salt and put the mixture into another bowl.   

Grease a cookie sheet.

One by one, dip each flower into the egg and then into the cornmeal. Place the flower, stem side up/ face down onto the cookie sheet.  When dipping the flower into the cornmeal, turn it back and forth to get as much cornmeal on it as possible. If the bowl is shallow, you might have to sprinkle cornmeal on the back of the flower.

Once the cookie sheet is covered with flowers, spaced out so they are in one layer, add the slices of butter by spacing them out between the flowers and rows. (you want the butter to melt and run over the tops of the flowers). One slice of butter every other row, should suffice. Space them out so that they are not directly opposite each other on the rows.

Bake 375 F for 20 minutes. They are done when they are browned.  Check them after 15 minutes. You might have to cook them for a total of 25 minutes.