Dandelion greens 蒲公英

three summer recipes

Fresh dandelion leaves are here. Just in time for the early summer season of Lixia.

As kids in Indiana, we used to hunt wild dandelions in the woods with our mother. One bucket for new greens and another for the wild strawberries that had just started peeking out from the previous year’s underbrush. The strawberries always managed to escape captivity during the journey home, leaving behind only pink juice stains as evidence of their existence. The bitter green leaves stood a much higher chance of making it back intact.

We could easily have sourced our dandelions closer to home. Our front yard was covered in the things, larger and darker green than the ones that grew wild. But seeing as how these beefy specimens had resisted regular dousing with every chemical known to the 1970s, they didn’t strike anyone as especially wholesome for human consumption.

We had always thought of eating dandelion greens as uniquely Palestinian, but it turns out that China has long consumed dandelions, not as food but as medicine.

In Chinese medicine, dandelion greens have a number of related functions. According to bencao gangmu, the classic book of pharmacology, dandelions cure abscesses, eradicate poisons, and disperse malignant qi.

蒲公英主治婦人乳癰腫，水煮汁飲及封之立消。解食毒，散滯氣，清熱毒，化食毒，消惡腫、結核、疔腫

In other words, dandelion greens are a purgative. Good to know in case you find yourself in need of some purging, which you very well might as the summer heat builds.

Here in Beijing, you often see people armed with a small spade and a cloth sack crabwalking around fields of wildflowers gathering up the new dandelions. These are for the medicine market. It’s only recently that larger greens have also started appearing alongside vegetables.

So how do you eat dandelions? Let me count the ways.

Leaves and flowers make a lovely tea, either straight or with salt. But certainly not with sugar. That would be silly. You can however cut the bitterness with tart red koji berries, which also make your tea especially photogenic.

You can mix young dandelion greens into a salad. In our house we used salt, olive oil and lemon juice, but for a Chinese table, the usual dressing would be sesame oil, brown vinegar and crushed garlic. If the leaves are tough or bitter, you can quickly steam or briefly dunk them in hot water to soften, but make sure to use a light touch.

Here in the north, the go-to methods for cooking any edible green are to scramble it with eggs or make into dumpling filling. In both cases, you start by chopping the leaves fine and if needed, salting and squeezing out any extra water. Dandelion greens are already fairly dry, so that step probably won’t be necessary, but keep it in mind.

I tried cooking minced dandelion greens with rice, an idea that was inspired by the perilla and sweet Cantonese sausage lixia rice I had made a few days back. For this one, I used a Mongolian wind-cured sausage. The salty-sour taste seemed like a better match with the bitter greens, but as the sausage had very little fat, the tastes didn’t blend quite as well as I had hoped. I still like the idea of the cooking the greens directly with rice, but for the moment I’ll leave this particular recipe in the “to-do” pile.