We just ate them

"Off you go, pick some dandelion leaves for the salad," my great-aunt May would say, handing us a large bowl before Sunday lunch.  And we did.  Frankly, I can't remember what they tasted like, but I was thinking of this salad today, as I watched the dreaded yellow flowers burst into bloom.  We didn't spray the weeds, we ate them. 

My forbearers consumed everything.  In the Spring it was fiddleheads.  Later it was mushrooms, which my Grandmother knew about.  Our city backyard was the place I was sent with a pair of scissors to snip mint for the leg of lamb.  Up at the cottage, in the sweltering July heat, Grandma would announce to me and my five cousins that today was berry-picking day.  That meant that instead of swimming, hanging out and playing in the water, we had to venture over the fence and into the local farmer's field -- braving those huge cows -- and pick raspberries.  She came with us, a white handkerchief knotted on her head to deal with the sun.  We were each given a pail and sent in different directions.  Grandma's pail was always overflowing; mine half empty because I ate most of the berries.

Then it was back to the cottage, where she fired up the wood stove and spent the day making preserves.  As I said, my family ate everything.  One of my favourite dishes was her humble onion pie.  Must have cost 50 cents to feed eight of us, but smothered as it was in buttery white sauce, you could not beat it.  My mother tells tales of how embarrassed she was as a girl when sent to the butcher to buy spareribs.  Considered a garbage meat, at 25 cents a rack they were eaten only by "poor" people, she told me.  "I never considered us poor," she said, even though her father had lost everything in the crash and subsequent depression.

With the price of food skyrocketing, I am grateful I can cook roots and leaves.  The 100-mile diet?  My grandmother invented it.