the humble nettle
Usually, I am not very interested in descending too far into the weed category for my food. Nettles are pretty far down there, not just a weed but a noxious, stinging weed! However, my sister-in-law Annie has been talking about them for a few weeks, even asking if I knew about nettles pesto.
Now she is even more squeamish than I am about possible dangers of plants (coming across an unexpected squash in the garden has been known to scare her), but yesterday when I was looking through Deborah Madison’s Local Foods cookbook to find something to make with the garden Swiss chard, I was taken by the nettle soup description. She talks about a friend who uses “cooked pureed nettle tips– an unbelievable shade of iron-park-bench green– to her pasta dough.” She also said the soup was “as green as Ireland.” I was interested in that color.
Nettles are a known tonic and it seems some people grow them for food, so who am I to not try it out. At the very least, the soup would be good for me.
I put on my gloves and picked the leaves off many nettles until I had a plastic bag full (8 oz). The soup calls for about the same amount of chard (6 cups– I have no idea why one is in ounces and the other in cups). The nettles are cooked in boiling water for 2 minutes, which gets rid of the sting and makes them dark green, sort of the color of mustard greens or collards (and with a similar, but much more delicate, scent).
boiling the nettles
In a pot you saute 1 diced onion and 1 thinly sliced small potato (I used two unskinned baby red potatoes) in 2 Tbs of butter about 5 minutes. Add to that the chopped chard, 2 tsp salt and 6 cups of vegetable or other stock. Add the nettles and cook for 15-20 minutes. Puree in batches, add 1/2 cup milk or cream and reheat, then taste for salt.
I made it exactly per the recipe, wanting to get the flavor of the nettles. We invited Tim and Annie over to try it out with us.
It is a gorgeous green, a color undimmed by the addition of the milk. But it is intensely bland. And it is a little slimy, even pureed, and seemed to all of us to be oddly “oily.” It was as if it was separating or had a film of oil on top. This wasn’t unpleasant, just unexpected. I wished I had gone with my instinct and put lots of garlic in with the onion and potato. We did spoon in some coriander chutney, my absolute favorite condiment, and that provided exactly the right zing. You could really flavor it any way you wanted– with mustard or a little jalapeno and sour cream or Indian spices.
the soup: really a darker green than this shows, but still more or less like cream-of-spinach
We did also notice a “tonic effect” later in the evening. I noticed about an hour after we ate that I was really thirsty. I also had a headache that felt sort of detoxifying, maybe related to the fact that I had a cup of coffee that morning, very unusual for me, or the too-much-ice-cream I had for dessert. Steve and Annie concurred on being thirstier than usual that evening.
I would possibly make this again as part of a detox or spring cleansing regimen (or, you know, if I’m forced to forage following an apocalypse). I would also use the soup as a base, substituting spinach or a stronger tasting green for the nettles. But there’s no question you have to spice it up. And there’s no way it’s worth dealing with the stinging of the nettles just to make this soup.