I have heard tell of people who eat dandelions green, raw, in the nude. But I don't number such people among my friends. I don't trust them. I believe they would suck eggs. They'd have to, they get such small good out of their greens. Such lovers of the raw lack essential essences. And they never have the generous mustaches and broad muscles and broad minds that my uncles used to have, dipping up dandelion greens and fat pork in equal proportions and shoving them by the forkful under the awnings of their mustaches. There my uncles sat, growing, rejuvenating, dipping up the dandelions mellowed over with a dash of our cider vinegar and escorted down by my mother's best brown biscuits, the best of all accompaniments. And I sat right smack across from them, keeping abreast of them with my forkfuls of chlorophyll unlimited. It was Spring and love and eight hands around!
Gosh! When I think of Spring, it comes to me first in the bittersweet flavor of honest, common dandelions, cooked for hours with honest, plain salt pork, grown right on your own home place alongside the dandelions. A wedding of home folks!
Dandelion greens, by the bye, are a whole meal. Let the anemic people who think of dandelions as something raw or steamed for five minutes as a side dish, as an extra, as a filigree to a meal, ponder that stout fact. These greens are the cellar, the living room, the chamber, and the attic. Buttressed about with salt pork, they are the makings of a man for one whole day of his life. They are the builders of dander. They are what old Nebuchadnezzar was rooting the earth to find. He who eats dandelions cooked my way, the right way, eats the sun and the other stars, as well as iron, I guess, love, and lots of pig. Sure enough, if they are dug up at their prime, at the peak of Spring, they have, each plant of them, one or two baby suns still rolled tightly at the center of their cosmos—globes which, when you bite into them, show a live and lovely gold at the heart.
Eaten all through the year, and eaten more as a mere vegetable, and not as a whole dinner, eaten as a supplement to other dishes, dandelions cease to be the center of the cosmos. They are just another green. But eaten as a whole meal, as the whole works, dandelion greens are remakers of men. Eaten at the flood tide of May, when a quadrillion of small suns across the whole map of America turn their fresh faces up to their golden father, eaten by people starved for six months for chlorophyll, used, with their still-budding suns folded in buds, to ignite and renew man like the sunlight that sets the phoenix bird on fire, dandelion greens are an act of Providence and a green climax to the year.
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