Wild & Free: Cheese and Clover

by By Sarajoy Van Boven, from the July 2006 Newsletter

One of the many joys of adult life is attempting to survive July in a hot stuffy office shuffling papers and making heroic attempts to stifle the memories of our collective, ancient, human experience and our long ago childhoods. Summer was meant for reveling in nature, not suffocating in offices. Therefore, I suggest you reintroduce yourself to the wild with these uncivilized, childish treats: Red Clover and Mallow.

Red Clover thrives on the green space between the sidewalk and the road in every corner of America, including yours. The leaves are three round leaflets, unless you’re lucky. Several leaves grow along the 1- to 2-foot-long stem, which is topped with a spiky fuchsia flower.

My mother taught me to pull off the purple tipped petals of the flowers, pulling out as much of the white tubular base as possible. Chew the white tubes for a taste of honey.

Eat the flowers and/or young leaves of Red clover in salads (raw) or tossed into soups. Some say the fresh flowers make great fritters.

Red Clover can also be dried: pick at peak bloom when free of dew or rain and dry at room temperature with well circulating air, out of the sun. When they are dry yet still pink, store them in a glass jar, away from sunlight. Native Americans apparently steamed them before drying.

For tea: pour boiling water over dried red clover, cover, steep for 5-10 minutes. Similarly, make a more potent infusion by steeping for four hours.

According to Susun Weed, Red Clover has a high vitamin content with “profuse and exceedingly absorbable calcium and magnesium.” Every necessary trace mineral can be found in a well-prepared tea of Red Clover. (Wise Woman Herbal for the Childbearing Years)

The seeds of red clover can be added to bread for a boost of nutrition, as recommended in Free for the Eating, by Bradford Angier. Angier also recommends the sweet roots, but offers no direction on their preparation.

Of the six books I checked, all recommend little to no consumption of white and yellow clovers. One author recommended limiting clover in general, but she didn’t distinguish between the different clovers. The other experts agreed that Red Clover, with the classic fuchsia flower, is probably fine for general consumption.

Common Mallow, Malva neglecta, an invasive, introduced weed according to http://plants.usda.gov, has made itself a family favorite by willfully replacing most of our lawn. Common Mallow is a sprawling plant that grows from a center root base and never grows up to lawn mower height. The leaves look like a round, dark green cloud drawn by an unobservant child. The leaves are circular with gently toothed edges and resemble flatter Wild Geranium leaves. Wild Geranium is not edible: please take care to identify with total certainty. The flowers look like morning glory flowers: pale, pink-tinged, white.

On this plant, the early, young leaves can be added to soups. In Eat the Weeds, Ben Charles Harris informs us that Low (closely related to the Common) Mallow leaves contain mucilage, pectin and asparagin. If he were your herbalist, he might recommend it for inflammation or urinary problems. However, if Susun Weed were your herbalist, she'd tell you that mallow leaves are rich in calcium and the components necessary for good absorption of said calcium. But, if Pliny the Elder, a naturalist and ridiculously prolific author of 1st Century Rome, were your herbalist, he would say, “Whoever shall take a spoonful of Mallows shall that day be free from all diseases that may come to him.” Of course, despite the 2,000 years since Pliny, the FDA has still not verified his claims.

Truth be told, the popular part of the mallow is not its leaves. It’s the cheese. Yes, the cheese! The flower gives way to a tiny round block of green cheese. Not real cheese, no, the dairy farmers of America would have a cow if we called it cheese publicly. But in our yards, it’s “cheese.” It’s round like a big block of gouda, only tiny and green. It’s edible fun for humans at play.

This July, nibble on these two little summer treats as you putter about the yard, playing hooky from work.

Copyright: Copyright on articles, recipes and images are jointly held by the Moscow Food Co-op and the respective contributors, except were otherwise noted.

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