many parts are edible

Tomato plants are poi­so­nous, right? Actu­ally, not at all, accord­ing to a New York Times arti­cle that a coworker sent me on Thursday.

I’d bought into the com­mon wis­dom that tomato plants, along with potato plants and many other mem­bers of the night­shade fam­ily, con­tained poi­sons that ren­dered them ined­i­ble. The arti­cle stated, how­ever, that the alka­loid in tomato plants, toma­tine, has no his­tory of poi­son­ing humans or live­stock, and that there was at least a brief record of the leaves being used in cook­ing, most notably in a tomato sauce served at the land­mark Berke­ley restau­rant, Chez Panisse. Fur­ther­ing the argu­ment that toma­tine is “prob­a­bly not a killer,” Harold McGee, the article’s author, men­tioned that the alka­loid is present in sig­nif­i­cant amounts in green toma­toes. There’s def­i­nitely a long his­tory of eat­ing those, often in fried form, often in the South.

I con­sider myself to be both a curi­ous eater and a curi­ous gar­dener, so I had to put this knowl­edge to the test. At the same time, I thought I’d also try my first prepa­ra­tion of “cos­sack aspara­gus,” the shoots of the aquatic cat­tail that I have grow­ing in the pond.

Cattails ready to cook

First, I cut some tomato leaves off one of the plants. Next I trimmed some of the cat­tail shoots that had escaped into the pond from their pot. I removed the tough­est outer leaves from the cat­tail shoots and rinsed them.

Cattail Stir Fry

I chopped the cat­tail stems and the tomato leaves, and added them to a stir-fry of gin­ger and Japan­ese shishito pep­pers from the gar­den. If I were a lit­tle more adven­tur­ous, I’d have left off soy sauce so that I could have tasted the ingre­di­ents bet­ter. But I chick­ened out. In went a driz­zle of soy.

The con­clu­sion? I served a lit­tle side por­tion to John with­out telling him what the ingre­di­ents were.

“At first I thought they [the cat­tails] were green onions,” he said. “But they didn’t taste like them. And then I thought they lemon­grass. But I was able to chew them.”

Such gush­ing enthu­si­asm! But after he made the reserved com­ments above, he agreed that the ingre­di­ents were indeed edi­ble, and that we could have them again. And yes, I lived to write about eat­ing both of these new ingredients.

Next time I’ll try sim­pler prepa­ra­tions so that I can bet­ter enjoy the indi­vid­ual fla­vors. Maybe a pesto sauce with raw tomato leaves. (I found that the cook­ing removed most of their fla­vor.) Or maybe I’ll try prepar­ing a side dish of cat­tail stems steamed like asparagus.

One of my gar­den­ing res­o­lu­tions for the year was to explore the lesser-known edi­ble qual­i­ties of my gar­den plants. I’m glad that I did.

August 01 2009 04:39 am | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: •

7 Responses to “many parts are edible”

  1. Brad B on 01 Aug 2009 at 7:50 am #

    I was for­warded the same arti­cle, but wanted some other input on the tomato leaves. I’m glad you vol­un­teered as guinea pig. It sounded like the leaves needed a lower heat (like sim­mered in a sauce), since you said the stir fry took away too much fla­vor. I was resis­tant to try­ing, but now I might.

    Glad you tested the cos­sack aspara­gus as well.

  2. Alice Joyce on 01 Aug 2009 at 8:05 am #

    Remark­able! I would never have had the courage or been as resource­ful, James.
    You’ve revealed yet another impres­sive char­ac­ter trait.

  3. Rosey Pollen on 01 Aug 2009 at 11:40 am #

    As a child my par­ents felt the need to feed us strange and bit­ter things they found to edi­ble. To this day, I have a hard time eat­ing some greens because they remind me of those expe­ri­ences. I am sure my par­ents were just being resource­ful but I think it was just an excuse to try out the hip­pie lifestyle. Not that there’s any­thing wrong with that.
    Thanks for stop­ping by my blog.
    I am glad you shared this recipe. Maybe I can grow up a lit­tle and try some­thing new again.
    Rosey

  4. tina on 02 Aug 2009 at 10:04 am #

    You are one brave gar­dener and connoisseur.

  5. Barbara E on 02 Aug 2009 at 9:09 pm #

    Great post. I will def­i­nitely try tomato leaves when we get back! My bravest (cra­zi­est) culi­nary exper­i­ment was in 1996, right before we left NJ to move to CA. We were hav­ing a big cycada year in NJ and the NY Times had an arti­cle on it with a recipe for cook­ing them. My son, 16 at the time, and I both tasted them. I blanched them and then stir fried them — yes in soy sauce. It tasted okay, but was way beyond my com­fort level. Glad I tried it though. Tomato leaves should be easier!

  6. susan morrison (garden-chick) on 03 Aug 2009 at 4:14 pm #

    So are you striv­ing for tasty, or set­tling for edible?

  7. lostlandscape on 04 Aug 2009 at 6:28 pm #

    Brad, it’s now sev­eral days later and I’m still alive, so I guess that counts as proof that the parts were edi­ble. I sus­pect it’ll take a few more tries before I fig­ure out how to really use these ingre­di­ents to their best advantage.

    Alice, thank you. It was a fun adventure.

    Rosey Pollen, there are a lot of things that my par­ents fed me that I didn’t like at the time but have come to really love. But then there are a few foods that I’ve never come around to enjoy­ing. It’s good your par­ents were curi­ous and wanted to share some of that curiosity.

    Tina, there’s that say­ing about the first per­son to eat an oys­ter being a really brave per­son. But I don’t quite put myself in that cat­e­gory because oth­ers had gone there first about decid­ing these things are edible.

    Bar­bara, that’s really funny about the soy sauce. I sup­pose cicadas shouldn’t be that dif­fer­ent from grasshop­pers, which seem to be a sta­ple sev­eral places. But I can’t say I’ve had either.

    Susan, I’ll set­tle for edi­ble for a first step! I’ll work on tasty when I get to play with more of these ingredients.

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