One man’s weed is another man’s prized food: 03 (莧菜 / 苋菜 / xiàn cài / amaranthus)

 

I first went to the French farm at Easter 1996, then every summer until 1999/2000, before picking up the visits again annually from 2006.

    After the first few visits, I started to notice a plant growing wild all over the French countryside where the farm is (which is Gers in the south-west), that looks very similar to 莧菜 / 苋菜 / xiàn cài, which my grandma used to grow in her kitchen garden on her coconut plantation.  

    I don’t remember it being commonly sold in the vegetable markets in Singapore during the 60s.

    The 莧菜 my grandma cultivated would be allowed to grow and grow as we picked and picked the leaves — up the plant, until we couldn’t get much foliage for a stir fry (leaves too small).  Then, we’d pull up the whole plant, about 2’/3’ tall at that stage, keeping the root.  We’d clean off the soil, then cut the whole thing into sections of about 1.5” length.   Stir fry, add a bit of light soya sauce, turn down the heat, and simmer.  A totally different experience altogether from eating the leaves:  taste-wise, texture-wise.  And nothing thrown out at all.

    The difference is: the French one has lots of seeds, which the farm mistress lets her hens, roosters and turkeys pick at when they’re allowed out of their pen at the end of the day to scrabble around.  The leaves are much smaller, so that one can’t get much foliage out of each plant for a stir fry.  I did try, though, to do a stir fry with chopped-up garlic one day — similar in taste, but I didn’t manage to get too much to make a proper dish portion, and also in case it was not safe.

    When I took my second sister to the farm one summer, she too asked me, “Is this plant what Grandma used to have in her kitchen garden?”

    I did ask the farm mistress what it was.  She said, “Just a weed,” shrugging her shoulders.

    With every visit, I thought what a shame she’d let her backyard supply of this delicious green leafy veg go to seed.  So much joy could be had out of it as a stir fry ingredient, with chopped-up garlic thrown in.

    I’ve since located it online:  it is amaranth, but not as a food item on the Western dinner table.  Instead, it is a bit of a popular indoor plant / greenhouse item with its cascading clusters of red seeds, so it’s a display plant rather than for eating.  (Here's a generalisation:  being practical and much more realistic and down to earth, the Chinese tend to look at plants first as a food item.  This could be due to the history of food shortages from droughts and other reasons.)

    Googling it has netted this:  

Quote

Amaranthus cruentus is a flowering plant species that is native from Central Mexico to Nicaragua. It yields a nutritious staple amaranth grain, being one of three Amaranthus species cultivated as a grain source, the other two being Amaranthus hypochondriacus and Amaranthus caudatus. 

Unquote

    So, it looks like the version I’d seen on/around the French farm is the seedy cousin of Grandma’s leafy, kitchen garden version.  It’s the version prized for its grain, instead of being left to get too old purely because the French do not think of it as human food.  Still, the farm mistress did dismiss it as “weed”.