Capers fill me with a strange sense of loss. Not for capers, per se, but for what we, as North Americans, are not eating. The tiny little bud of a shrub that grows near the Mediterranean is pretty much inedible fresh. However, once brined, they're quite the miracle. Imagine how many shrubs, berries, bushes, sprouts, and whatnot people had to taste, reject, and try again—pickled!— before they came up with capers.
Now, consider North America. The people who might have tasted the things we live among were steamrolled over so quickly by European settlers that their knowledge has been largely lost. Little fragments of knowledge persist, though. For instance, we know that many North American tribes used cattails as a primary food source: They ate the young stalks like asparagus in the spring, ate the young seed-head like corn on the cob in the early summer, and ground the roots for high-gluten flour in the fall. So I was thrilled when I stopped by Clancey's, my favorite Minneapolis butcher shop, and found that they were selling both pickled young cattails and daylily buds.
Clancey's is a favorite of mine because all of the lamb, chicken, pork, beef, duck, pheasant, and so forth are sourced from Minnesota and southwestern Wisconsin farmers. The owners, business partners Kristin Tombers and Greg Westergreen, have a deep intellectual curiosity and respect for all concepts attached to the idea of eating locally. Clancey's buys the cattails and daylilies from a forager who works southern Minnesota and northern Iowa, picking the wild plants in a sustainable way. I got a cup of each. The pickled cattails taste like white asparagus, clean, crunchy, and just a little bit herbal, with the texture of the white parts of scallions. The daylilies are like tight, springy squash-blossoms, and as Westergreen pickled them with lots of pink and black peppercorns, fennel seeds, mustard seeds, and so forth, they have a wildly spicy quality. I'm thinking they'd make a great dirty gin martini.
Clancey's Meats & Fish
4307 Upton Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN
612-926-0222
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