Happy April, food & foraging friends!
It’s been a happy April indeed, pun intended, as I celebrated my 50th birthday eating my way through Cajun Country with two BFFFs (best foraging/food friends)!
Crawfish etouffée, smoked boudin sausage, jalapeno crawfish hush puppies, banana foster bread pudding, catfish po boys, crawfish potpies, alligator bites in bang bang sauce, shrimp and grits with Tasso ham gravy, french toast made from biscuits… the list of Lafayette, Louisiana delicacies we conquered goes on and on. I stayed so full I was panting like a dog because belly breaths were out of the question.
Besides some Brussels sprouts in Tasso ham, deep fried okra, and corn maque choux, vegetables were not on our itinerary. I was therefore delighted to meet up with naturalist, wild foods author and retired professor Charles Allen for a private tour of Allen Acres, his sprawling 26-acre property, to take in some roughage, marvel at his whimsical recycled sculptures, and learn about the region’s wild food heritage.
With a radio blasting in a distant barn to keep the coyotes away, we roamed Charles’ nationally renowned moth and butterfly gardens, taking in tidbit upon tidbit of plant lore and wisdom. I and my fellow Aries (Charles had just turned 78 a few days before me) tripped over each other’s words, so excited we were to talk wild edibles. The native Louisianan — donning a sporty Sriracha ball cap, I might add — shared some fave food hacks, like soaking elderflower in water for a refreshing floral drink, and cooking up a variety of saw briar that tasted like wild asparagus with Tony Chachere’s classic creole seasoning. We freshened our breath with a variety of mountain mint that Charles’ grandmother would put in her homemade sausage, and scraped red juice on our palms from bloodweed, a type of ragweed the botanist told us was used in old Tarzan movies as fake blood.
It was balm for the belly and soul after a few days of nearly eating ourselves to death. To be fair to our whirlwind itinerary, we did experience many other wonderful aspects of Cajun, creole and “redneck” culture, redneck being the self-identifying moniker of the non-Cajun whites who were of Scottish rather than French descent, according to Charles. More on the region’s music, food, nature and culture on my Instagram posts — it was a fascinating destination indeed!
While Charles easily covered 30 local plants in our walk, five stood out to me as having unique cultural and historic ties to the region.
Left/top: Pokeweed, a Southern heritage plant, is only edible in this young stage when careful prepared. The leaves of the yaupon plant is a prolific Southern source of caffeine (which makes me wonder why they used non-caffeinated chicory as a proxy in wartime!) Many locally processed mixes like this contain sassafras leaf powder, known as filé.
Right/bottom: The author and her fellow Arian and plant lover, naturalist Charles Allen; bull thistle or chadron; and the leaves of a young sassafras tree.
Sassafras: I love talking about the flavorful, mucilaginous leaves of these trees on my walks, as they are the base of filé powder that gives gumbo its je ne sais quoi. They are also distinctive as having four different leaf shapes, including right and left hand mittens. Charles picked a branch and had us scratch the surface – it sure enough smelled like root beer, as its roots used to be the base of that favorite frosty mug drink. I bought a Creole fry mix at the grocery, and discovered that too had sassafras filé powder!
Yaupon: Charles had several bushes of this native bush on his property, which I was intrigued to discover is the only caffeinated plant indigenous to the US, and has a rich history of Native American use throughout the South. Charles speculated that its Latin name Ilex vomitoria came from tea traders who wanted to give the popular drink a bad name. I ordered a box of it online once home, and really enjoyed its rich, earthy flavor, reminiscent of Rooibos tea.
Pokeweed: This is another one I like to talk about on walks, being a Southern delicacy and heritage plant, but also a good teaching tool, given that it has to be harvested at the right time, with the right parts, and prepared the right way to avoid toxicity. I also like to share the factoid that Elvis performed a runaway hit about pokeweed called Polk Salad Annie.
But until this trip I knew not that said song was actually originally written and performed by Louisiana Swamp Rock musician Tony Joe White in the 1960s! Check out the kids grooving to this wild plant anthem on American Bandstand here, and listen to the intro, where he describes colorfully describes the plant and Miss Polk Salad Annie, who used to “go out in the evenings and pick her a mess of it.” Blanchard, Louisiana has had a poke festival for nearly as long as I’ve been alive, and that’s a long ass time.
Chadron: I first heard about this local wild staple from a lady hunter we met en route to Charles’ place. The stems of bull thistle, known in Cajun French as chadron, is pickled locally and also eaten raw (after peeling) like celery . This is another I was already familiar with, but hadn’t bothered with, seeming like too much work. Next time I’ll give it a try!
Manglier: I didn’t learn about this Southern cure-all from Charles, but in a little Lafayette grocery with a “made in Louisiana” section. For $15, I could get manglier cough drops or a small bottle of tea. I put my inner cheapskate aside to support local herbalism and got the cough drops. They had a deep pepperminty flavor with the potency of eucalyptus – definitely a sinus and sore throat cleaner!
I sure could go on and on about the wonders of Cajun Country – I didn’t even get into the owls, snakes and alligators we met boating through the bald cypress swamps, or the incredible, and incredibly welcoming, lodge with roseate spoonbill and egret rookery & crawfish and rice farm on site we visited en route to Charles. There are no direct flights to Lafayette from DC, but I often find the best places on Earth are a little harder to come by.
If you’re new to my newsletter – thanks for reading, and feel free to check out past editions and upcoming walks here. I’ll be resuming my sporadic foraging and cider tasting tours at Anxo soon too — follow me on Instagram to see when those are announced!
Wildly yours,
April