Cooking With Nettles: Spring's Precious Sting

Nettles- the edible leaf that is also known as the devil's leaf.

But nutrition and medicinals are not the only roles the nettle has played in Irish history. Like flax, the source of linen, nettles can also be made into cloth. The plant’s fibers are, in fact, stronger than flax and when spun and woven create a textile similar to hemp. Well into the 20th century, nettle fibers were still being transformed into household sheets, tablecloths and fishing nets.

Nettles were also once used as dyes. The leafy parts of the plant will color wool green, or black when iron is used as a mordant, and the roots produce a gold color when mixed with alum. Hens fed nettle seeds will lay more eggs, and oil extracted from the seeds can be burned in a lantern. Lastly, nettles can be used as a vegetarian substitute for rennet when making cheese.

The Irish have been eating nettles for so many eons that the plant is well rooted in folklore. It was long believed that eating nettles would protect one from sorcery and feeding wilted leaves (which also negates the sting) to cows would safeguard the dairy herds from hexes that could cause them to stop producing milk. Even now some people still swear that nettles will only grow where elves live and thus deliberately plant nettles in their gardens, a practice that inevitably proves how mischievous the fairy folk are as nettles, which reproduce both by seed and underground rhizomes, can quickly take over nearby flowerbeds.

Since nettles grow wild and are easily foraged everywhere in Ireland, they have long played a vital role in the diet of the poor, a fact that is celebrated in the song ‘The Town of Ballybay’ which was recorded by Tommy Makem and The Clancy Brothers and can be listened to at http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=cqu2mwPdkGE&feature=related. In this humorous tune, a woman of dubious character feeds her brood of more than twelve children “on potatoes and on soup she made with nettles and lumps of hairy bacon that she boiled up in the kettle.”

During An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger), a clause in the Irish Poor Law stipulated that anyone who owned more than a half-acre of land was not eligible for any aid or relief, forcing the starving famine victims to forage for edible plants, the most vital of which was the humble nettle. At the Irish Hunger Memorial in Manhattan’s Battery Park two miles of undulating walls that support the Memorial are lined with illuminated text of famine statistics and quotes, and patches of nettles can be found among the plantings of native Irish flora that surround a derelict stone cottage on the small hillock that recreates a plot of 19th century Irish farmland.

Our ancestors may have lacked the wheel, thermal underwear and television, but they were no pikers when it came to food. They ate just about anything. And therein lies the answer. Times were tough, and food was scarce. If it didn’t kill you, it went into the pot. And thankfully so, because nettles are one of the food world’s great tastes. Sláinte!

​
Nster.com