Feeding ourselves with weeds

"I've been working hard this week to clear out the pigweed from my garden," my Grandpa Possehl told me last week. "Friends tell me the restaurants in Chicago will charge top dollar to let you eat it, but they use a different name for it. Starts with a P -- purl-something, pers-something, sounds kinda like parsley, but that's not it."

"Purslane?" I asked, thinking of recipes I'd read from the 1500s using that name in the ingredient lists. It appears in spring salad greens recipes, among a long list of garden herbs and members of the allium family. Lettuce is there, too, but it takes a back seat in importance.

"Yeah, that's it. A chef uses the fancy name and will pay a lot for it as a delicacy, but down on the farm we just called it pigweed, and I just pull it out in bunches and throw it out."

I jumped at the chance to taste something I'd only read about before. I wasn't even sure which weed it was until Grandpa described it. Here's a picture taken at the University of Illinois. He gamely volunteered to pull some and send it home with me along with some fresh mixed lettuces from the garden. He chuckled as he put it into a plastic bag and told Grandma, "I'm giving Heather some of that pigweed out of the garden to eat. Heck, if she likes it well enough, I'll give her a whole big garbage bag next time." As I left for home with the bag, both of them grinned conspiratorially as if they'd just gotten away with a practical joke. "Hope you like the pigweed."

My husband and I mixed together the lettuce leaves and the purslane leaves stripped from the vines and ate them with homemade dressing yesterday for dinner and today for lunch. Turns out Andrew's instincts for making salad dressing correspond with 15th Century English tastes. He mixed a dressing of about half white wine vinegar and half olive oil and salt.

The verdict? Grandpa, you should start exporting your pigweed to fancy restaurants. It's delicious! Next time purslane comes up on its own in a part of the yard or the garden box where I could afford to let it grow bigger, I'm keeping it. It is a tender green (comes from being a succulent plant that stores moisture in its leaves to use in dry times), and its tangy flavor is very similar to clover leaves, which I occasionally enjoy eating freshly plucked from the lawn.