I have a special place in my heart for the genus Chenopodium. This may be because one of its member species once kept me from… well, if not starving, then at least a serious case of malnutrition. When I was living from meal to cadged meal in Buffalo, I derived a lot of my leafy green vegetable intake from Chenopodium album, known popularly as “lamb’s quarters.” Lamb’s quarters is an obnoxious weed to most people, and a source of pollen to which many people are allergic. (I have a bit of an allergy to the stuff myself, though never enough to regret its proximity.) It grows thick and fast, about three feet tall where soils are moist and fertile, and produces many thousands of seeds in a very short time. This is a feature, not a bug: I used to take whole stems of lamb’s quarters, flowers and all, chop them up and steam them or blanch them, and eat the whole thing. The seeds are rich in Vitamin A and a lot of minerals. The leaves are sweet, like a lighter form of spinach. I persuaded more than one friend, dubious at my using vacant lots as a produce market, to make lamb’s quarters a regular summer food. I did this by offering them a taste. It’s good stuff.
Pictured above is Chenopodium capitatum, also called “strawberry blite” for the appearance of its fruit. The fruit is surprisingly sweet for a plant related to spinach: think halfway between raspberries and lettuce, only watered down. Strawberry blite is an annual. This plant grew with rather astonishing speed after this summer’s hot spell killed off almost everything in the yard: I did a deep watering to save Zeke’s lawn and the blite came back from seed shed last year, bloomed and set fruit within a couple weeks.
A “blite,” pronounced like the disease, is a common name for many plants in this family whose fruits have fleshy calices. What family “this family” refers to has undergone some recent revision. Chenopods were considered the chief genus in the family Chenopodiaceae. But in 2003, the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group abolished the family Chenopodiaceae, placing all its members in the amaranth family, known on the street as Amaranthaceae. The Angiosperm Phylogeny Group is an international consortium of systematic botanists who meet every so often to discuss high-level matters of plant taxonomy and attempt to reach consensus on how that taxonomy should be revised to reflect our increasing knowledge of plant genomes, and why those meetings aren’t every bit as popular as Burning Man I cannot fathom. The reassignment of chenopods into family Amarathaceae surprised no one, though not all botanists have signed onto it yet. Amaranths and chenopods are similar enough that paleontologists and archaeologists have long lumped them together. When one such finds a trace of old pollen that might be from either group, they label it “cheno-am” and are done with it.
My affection for the old Chenopodiaceae may well be inherited, at least in part. Beets are or were members of the Chenopodiaceae — though they, like spinach, are not true Chenopodiums but boast their own genus within the family — and beets provided my father’s mother with a living for the last few decades of her life. There was a cannery around the corner from her house in Gorham, New York, the cannery thus being the most convenient place for her to seek employment. Part of the year the place canned sauerkraut, which always made it pleasant to drive through town. The rest of the time, when the cannery wasn’t closed for winter and my grandmother on unemployment, the place canned beets. Canneries are among the least pleasant and most dangerous places to work one can imagine, and yet Grandma Clarke worked there well into her eighties. She didn’t actually need the money, as I understand it. She wanted something to do. We always had far too many jars of pickled beets around for my taste. Grandma would give us a case every once in a while. I am only now, in the last ten years or so, regaining my taste for them. The day my grandmother died seven or so years back, Becky tired of me walking around the house confused and mourning and took me out for dinner to distract me. The waitress put my salad in front of me: atop it, glistening, was a deep red slice of pickled beet. I speared it with my fork, held it up and looked at the light shining through it, started to tear up again. “Aw, honey,” Becky said winking ever so slightly. “You don’t have to eat it.”
After we buried Harley the other night we went out for dinner. My salad came adorned with shredded carrots. I held a shred up with my fork, quivered my lower lip. Becky burst out laughing.
Quinoa is a Chenopodium as well, Chenopodium quinoa, and shares with its sibling species lamb’s quarters and strawberry blite tasty, nutritous seeds. Quinoa’s seeds, as you know if you have ever attempted to cook the stuff without following directions, are protected by a coat of saponins, which taste bitter. The saponins are easy to rinse off. Quinoa’s a good grain substitute for cultivation in places too high in altitude for actual grass grains to grow well, and as such is a popular staple in altitudinous places such as Bolivia or Prescott, Arizona (pers. comm.)
My favorite chenopod tastes odd no matter how often you rinse it. Epazote (Chenopodium ambrosioides), a staple herb in Mexican cooking, is one of the few plants that made it through my garden’s hot summer unscathed. It stinks. I like, but am not sure I trust, Wikipedia’s take on the name’s etymology: “(epatli = skunk + zotli = herb).” No mere saponins rankle the tastebuds of the epazote eater, though the plant secretes them. They’re hardly noticeable amid the cocktail of systemic poisons the plant concocts. As has happened so often, plant substances useful as pesticides — caffeine, capsicum, mescaline — become sources of human pleasure. Epazote has a strong camphor aroma and taste, and it’s got notable amounts of the common aromatics thymol and cymene, both of them found in thyme and cumin, and limonene, found in limons.
But the main source of epazote’s rank flavor, the terpene ascaridole, the stuff that makes a sprig of epazote melted into queso blanco on a warm corn tortilla so delicious… now that is one weird-ass chemical, my friend. It’s a potent neurotoxin, enough that while eating a few epazote leaves a day is no real risk, if a guy my size drank an ounce of ascaridole he would likely die. For no doubt related reasons, it’s an effective antihelmintic: If you have worms, eat some epazote. This property of the herb has been known for some time: an alternate common name for epazote (and a few other chenopods) is “wormseed.” Ascaridole shows some promise as a drug useful in treating early stages of cancer: one in vitro study of tumor cell lines shows it may work to slow cell division in multiple drug resistant cancer cell lines, raising the possibility that cancer patients may someday be directed to report to their local taco stand for chemotherapy. Who could be against that? I ask you.
The coolest thing though? Ascaridole explodes:
Like other low molecular weight organic peroxides, [ascaridole] is unstable and prone to explosion when heated or treated with organic acids.
How could I reasonably be expected not to grow something like that in my garden? I mean, really.
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7 comments on "Chenopodiaceae"I got an online deal recently (you know how I do that) and was going to order some Quinoa to try, but I didn’t end up getting any because I was able to get a better deal on teff, amaranth, buckwheat, and some barley. Plus I knew I liked amaranth, so it was a safer choice.
So now I have about a lifetime supply of all of those, my cupboard stuffed with bags of them. I should put them in the freezer but then I wouldn’t have room for much else.
Amaranth is yummy. Turns out I seem to be a little sensitive to buckwheat, can’t overdo it. Haven’t tried the teff yet.
I can feed you some quinoa on the fossil hunting trip.
Miss Patsy was reading your story about Harley and crying last night.
I have to be very sneaky about greens with strong flavor; Miss Patsy is not adventurous with food.
yrs, B.D.L.
Like other low molecular weight organic peroxides, [ascaridole] is unstable and prone to explosion when heated or treated with organic acids.
Ha! So no squeezing a lime on your tortilla with epazote.
Try beets roasted, or shredded and cooked over low heat with olive oil and salt and pepper, then eaten on slices of French bread with goat cheese or fresh mozzarella.
Beets are INCREDIBLE baked.
Wrap in foil, bake like a potato, but don’t pierce the beet like you would a potato.
Can’t remember for sure, but I think they take longer than a potato.
Baked beets are so good its amazing. A flavor like you’ve never had before. Only thing is, don’t get freaked out when you pee bright red for the next day or two… since you’re not boiling out the flavor, you’re also not boiling out the pigment and it has to come out somehow!
My coworker, from Russia, recommends just eating them raw. Beets.