I'm a roaming cowboy riding all day long,
Tumbleweeds around me sing their lonely song.
Nights underneath the prairie moon,
I ride along and sing this tune.
See them tumbling down,
Pledging their love to the ground,
Lonely but free I'll be found
Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.
-Tumbling Tumbleweeds, by the Sons of the Pioneers.
What if “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” went from being a classic cowboy song to a sauté dish? It's not as farfetched as it sounds.
Tumbleweed, or Salsola tragus is an introduced species that first popped us in the U.S. in South Dakota in 1877. Since tumbleweeds are widely distributed over the steppes of Russia , it's thought that Ukrainian immigrant pioneers on the Great Plains were the most likely vector. Once rooted in the new world, the exotic tumbleweeds took care of spreading themselves. The plant is now classed as a noxious weed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The tumbleweed plant is a tender herb when young, and grows into a stiff round ball of stems that breaks loose from the soil when the autumn winds blow, so that the plant can roll across the landscape, spreading seeds. The following spring the old severed roots sprout new growth, and the tumbleweed's dispersed seeds sprout in new locations. Tumbleweeds “pledged their love” so successfully to a virgin continent that they soon made their way over the Colorado Rockies, all the way to Death Valley , and even into the musical top 40. Maybe the food network comes next.
In this week's harvest box I've included an heirloom Italian green called agretti , or Salsola soda , which is a close cousin to the tumbleweed. Agretti is a tender, succulent herb when harvested young, with a pleasing, sour taste. In Italy agretti is used chopped and tossed in salads or sautéed with onions to slip into pasta dishes, but it makes a good stir-fry green.. The name Salsola comes from the Latin salsus , meaning salt, because the various Salsola family members tolerate very salty soil. The tumbleweed's appreciation for tough conditions helped the plant spread aggressively across the American West.
Italian Salsola soda grows with the vigor of a weed, just like the Russian Salsola tragus . Agretti seeds are hard to find in the States, and costly to import now that the dollar has fallen to historic lows against the Euro. Young tumbleweeds have a similar texture and flavor to agretti , and are used as a vegetable on the steppes, cooked like spinach, but I don't have time to forage across the countryside for wild greens for your harvest boxes. So last year I grew out some agretti to maturity and harvested a seed crop. This summer I'm also going to drive out to the Panoche Valley , east of Hollister, and gather the seeds of some local tumbleweeds as they go tumbling past. The Panoche Valley is a quiet spot, a desert, hidden in the hills between Hollister and the San Joaquin Valley . I like it there. It'll be a fun experiment to grow out a small crop of tender, young tumbleweeds to eat.
When movie directors want to suggest empty space and alienation, one device they occasionally resort to is to show a tumbleweed rolling across the screen, just as the Country and Western musical group, The Sons Of The Pioneers, used the tumbleweed to suggest a relationship between loneliness, rootlessness and freedom. That's fine for film and music, but the culinary arts ought to be about fulfillment. Food is more than fuel for a restless body. Our daily meals can reaffirm and strengthen our ties to tradition, to family, to seasons and to places. We're all sons and daughters of the pioneers here in America , and we've changed our landscape dramatically, often for the worse. Someday we'll understand our freedom as the opportunity we've been given to take root and to take responsibility for our behavior in this community of plants and animals that sustains us.
When that day comes, weeds will simply be plants out of place, instead of plants we don't understand. It's an ideal world I'm talking about, I know, but, with agretti , the Italians learned to cook an alkali-tolerant weed and transform it into a treat, so maybe we can learn to savor our own landscape too. This week, I'm sending you a portion of Salsola soda to cook at home, but you'll know we've learning as a nation how to “pledge our love to the ground” when a traveler can pull off of I-5 at dawn and buy a tasty, fresh, local, braised tumbleweed taco for breakfast.
