Hop-Tops

The young shoots of hop are excellent served as asparagus. Break off the young shoots, tie them in bundles, and boil them in a little pot liquor for twenty minutes. They are served like asparagus with melted butter. (See plate).

The Wild Hop may be dressed in the same way and is good, but has a slightly bitter flavour.

Burdoch

The stalks of this wild plant are very good cooked as asparagus.

The Common Arum (lords and ladies) has a tuberous whitish root about the size of a nutmeg. Dried and pounded it is sent to London from the Isle of Portland (where it is dug up by the country people) as Portland sago. Arum root is saponaceous and will clean woollen well; it is also used as a cosmetic; the "Cypress Powder " used in Paris is made from it.

The Early Purple Orchis

The tuber of this plant is remarkably farinaceous and nutritive. An ounce of it dried, mixed with an ounce of soup stock, is said to be sufficient for the day's food of a working man. Put into milk it will prevent it from turning sour.

The tuber is prepared for use by washing, brushing off the brown skin, and roasting it on a tin plate in an oven from six to ten minutes. It is then placed to dry gradually in moderate heat.

Borage

All parts of this plant contain much mucilage. The stem and leaves contain nitrate of potassia and other saline qualities. It is very cooling, and a tonic. It is a wild plant with a beautiful blue flower. It is used in making "cups " of different kinds. Nothing can look prettier than the borage with its lovely blue flowers lying on the top of a cider cup. It grows in gardens to a good height.

Sea Holly or eringo root is found on the sea shore. It is prickly, has dry horny leaves, and is of a bluish hue. The Swedes eat the young shoots as asparagus. Candied, it is sold at chemists' shops, and is very strengthening.

Dandelion

This weed is used for making Taraxacum coffee, and is excellent as a remedy for bilious attacks. Blanched dandelion roots make a pleasant addition to a salad; they are blanched like other plants by covering them from the light with earth or sand.

A Mode Of Use

Take three pounds of best coffee, one pound of hard extract of dandelion and succory reduced to coarse powder and ground.

Wild Spinach

The roots may be eaten in spring like asparagus. "Good King Henry," as it is often called, is eaten also as spinach.

Watercress

A cooling vegetable eaten at breakfast or tea; it should grow in very pure running water; and in the spring be carefully examined, to see that no spawn of toads, etc., is clinging to the leaves.

Some Ferns are eatable (especially the common brake); they should be boiled when they are quite young, covered with down, and the fronds bent and rolled up in themselves; they form a delicious kind of asparagus. (See Galton's Works.) In Siberia the fern is used in brewing ale. - One third of the fern root to two-thirds of malt. - Dr. Clarke says, "the properties of ferns are tonic, antibilious, and decidedly deobstruent; and therefore a fern, if esculent, might be expected to be very serviceable as a change of diet, to those labouring under dyspepsia and its consequences".

For eating, the young fronds of the fern must be blanched.

" The young fronds," continues Dr. Clarke, "should be cut as soon as they first appear at the surface of the ground, and as low down as may be; and when quite blanched, boiled for one hour, but if tinged with green, for an hour and a quarter, or an hour and a half, the leafy part in the latter instance being rejected, and a sufficient quantity of salt added to give the vegetable a slightly saline flavour".

Soap-Wort

The leaves and flowers of this plant are saponaceous; they contain a large quantity of alkali. They may be boiled, and clothes washed in the water will not require soap.