What is the strangest old timey vegetable you have eaten

[tenngun]

I remember a book I read on out door survival back in the 79s. One chapter was on snakebite. In the old days people cut the wound and “sucked out the poison”. They slapped on chewed tobacco, drank a bunch of rotgut, urinated on the wound, rubbed it down with snake root, ect ect.
The snake is used to killing mice, not people and most of the time does not inject enough poison to kill, and sometimes none at all. So people treat a non deadly wound with traditional treatments and get better. They would have got better anyway.
Cancer is sadly a similar path. It does not follow the same pathway for everyone. And a healthy life style can slow the process. So someone can follow a non traditional pathway and it looks like they are beating the cancer. So the one successful looking out come gets in to the paperwork and reported. While the people that die quickly get brushed off as waiting to long before they started ”˜natural treatment’.
Cancer treatment is ugly. It makes people really sick. The drugs that ateinjected are so poisonous you have to wear special protective clothing just to prep it. The drugs them self can kill. So people want to grasp at straws.
A good ”˜natural life style’ can improve ones general health. So it makes sense that if you can control your blood pressure, or cholesterol with a good diet, help your joints with a dietary supplement, then you should be able to stop cancer.
Unfortunately it’s not true. And a bad outcome awaits those that try.

 

[Black Hand]

Medicine is also stochastic.

Successful treatment is determined on a continuum - some cancers respond differently to treatment based upon genetic makeup and a variety of other factors. There are no guarantees, especially with cancer (keeping in mind, that as of last count, there were over 200 types of cancers, each with different characteristics and potential causes).

Regardless, I'd choose conventional treatment over quackery any day - At least I know the odds. As opposed to hoping/wishing it will have an effect and not kill me....

 

[Nativearizonan]

This thread sure went off track fast.

I was assuming by "old timey vegetable" the OP meant something grown in a garden. There are plenty of other places to talk about wild edible plants or cancer cures.

I've grown and eaten a lot of different heritage beans, corn, squash and watermelons. These, of course, are just different cultivars. I grew mangels once, and they weren't bad. They were yellow, and are more closely related to sugar beets than the red beets I am used to. They were, and maybe still are, raised for livestock feed in Europe. They were sweet and very large.

Maybe the strangest, to most folks here, would be the American Devil's Claw (Martynia, or Proboscidea), not the herb that they sell in herbal stores which is a different species. Martynia exists as a wild plant around the SW, but was cultivated and specific cultivars still are cultivated for both food and for use in native basketry. The young fruit looks and is slimy like okra, with a slightly different taste.

 

[Black Hand]

Part of the issue is that old timey is a rather vague term. Each culture has it's own vegetable(s) that might be considered oddities elsewhere. Chinese Bitter Melon comes to mind...

 

[Kansas Jake]

Devil's claw grows in western Kansas and is a troublesome weed in some areas. I didn't realize it was edible.

 

[Nativearizonan]

You can eat both the immature pods and the seeds, as with okra, if you are familiar with okra. Here is a seed source for both a wild version and a cultivar:
https://shop.nativeseeds.org/collections/devils-claw

 

[Nativearizonan]

Devil's claw can be pickled, as well:
https://www.wildflower.org/magazine/native-plants/taste-place-pickling-devils-claw

 

[coloradoclyde]

Use to eat watercress when I was young....and choke cherries :idunno:

 

[tenngun]

Well I love choke cherries, persimmon, wild hickory nuts and the little fellers that share my taste in the woods.

 

[Black Hand]

Choke cherries, Elder berries, Haws, Service berries...

 

[zimmerstutzen]

When I was a kid, I ate a fair amount of apricot pit kernels. My aunt had an apricot tree right outside the kitchen and when we finished off the fruit, we cracked the pit and ate the kernel. We did it because it tasted like almond extract. It is a close relative of the almond.

I make up some sassafras tea every summer. I don't think there is anything as thirst quenching, even though it has a small bit of safriol in it. (scheduled substance under fed law)

But I would never rely on folk medicine to heal a serious disease.

I eat raw ginger. Yep grab a root and chomp on it. It is a spicy hot but not tongue scalding ear popping, temple sweating like some hot peppers eaten down south. I like fresh ground horseradish too. another kind of spicy hot that is different from hot peppers.

 

[NeilMacleod]

Apricot pit kernals are used to make Amaretto. Their poisonous like apple seeds so not wise to eat lots, I always eat the whole apple seeds and all

 

[Nativearizonan]

I have noticed dandelion greens showing up in the supermarket, lately. I guess that is one more wild food that has made the big-time and has starting being cultivated, and not just collected.

As far as collected wild foods, I graze on whatever wild plants are in season, just about every time I go out for a hike. Too numerous in specie to mention.

 

[Sean Gadhar]

Common mallow, Service berries, gooseberries, Rose hip,

The pods from common mallow (Malva sylvestris) work nice to thicken a stew, as I understand it the root should not be used as a food (Unlike marsh mallow)

 

[George]

Mesquite pod flour. Pawpaw. Wild hazelnuts. Gooseberries. Puffball. Morels. Mayapple jelly. Crabapples. Staghorn sumac berries. Dandelions, wild garlic, black walnuts, hickory nuts, juniper berries, mulberries, sourgrass and bamboo shoots from my yard.

Spence

 

[coloradoclyde]

Loved eating wild onions when I was young...

 

[coloradoclyde]

Wild hazelnuts.

Spence

Funny I needed a handle for my trekking frying pan...I cut one from a large bush that looked like a coppice, not far from my house in the winter. The next summer I visited that bush and discovered it was a hazelnut...A pleasant surprise..

 

[Nativearizonan]

Okay, I'll just start with just the wild greens that I've eaten, off the top of my head, and I have eaten multiple species of many of these:

Mustard, Amaranth, Lamb's Quarter, Dandelions, Chicory, Arugula, Miners Lettuce, Filaree, Puncture Vine, Tumbleweeds, Poke Salad, Purslane, Prickly Lettuce, Burdock, Stinging Nettles.

That's a start. I'm sure I'd come up with a few more if Iooked through a book or went out in the field at certain times of year.

Don't make the mistake some British soldiers did in 17th century Jamestown, where toxic Jimson Weed was eaten for greens, and where it got that name. I just posted the story over on the "Bacon's Rebellion" thread.

 

[George C]

I have always ate the whole apple also Core seeds and all.

 

[Black Hand]

Prickly Pear fruits...