"wilting greens"

Tonight I was sauteing baby spinach to eat with chicken cordon blu and roasted baby potatoes and I remembered how my mother, all through the spring and summer and well into the fall, would "wilt" the greens my father picked.

He would pick them in our yard and my Uncle Russel's yard and the lot where we played baseball and football and in the mountains all around us. And my mother would "wilt" them, what I use a fancy french term to describe. She would 'saute' them in a frying pan with a little butter and oil and salt and pepper (I add garlic, which wouldn't have been on her 'food radar') and we would eat them as a side to whatever else we were eating. Certainly not chicken cordon blu in the home of my childhood. We spoke and ate nothing French.

But what I thought about was those 'greens' that my father found in the wild. In my memory there was a trace of arugula in it all--that peppery taste--but 'arugula' would not have been spoken in my childhood.

My father, only one generation removed from me, was a 'hunter-gatherer'. We had rabbit and squirrel as well as wild greens. And I am incapable of any of that. The 'hunter-gatherer' has disappeared from our line. The only 'green' I remember a name for was what my father called "English Plankton". There were at least a half-dozen other wild plants that went into our 'wilted greens' but I have no memory of their names. Even then, when I'd accompany  him in his gathering, all they looked like were weeds to me. Dandelion too, how could I have forgotten that? The greens from those little yellow flowers that turned to wisps of seeds borne by fluffy white that we blew away each summer. Dandelions and English Plankton. What else, I wonder, went into the 'wilted greens' that were a staple of our diet?

At least I remember the gathering my father would do. My children have no memory of eating out of the yard and my granddaughters, I think, believe greens of any kind were grown in a supermarket.

Does anyone out there still gather greens from the wild? What are some of the names? Email me at Padrejgb@aol.com if you have names. I only look at blog comments every few months.

They were good--those 'wilted greens', as I remember. I love 'greens' (sauteed or 'wilted') from collards to beet greens to arugula to spinach. I've become especially fond of root vegetables (parsnips, beets, turnips, like that) and greens as I age.

I wish I could go gather them in the wild.