Mustang Grapes to Purslane

How I found sustenance growing wild in my South Side neighborhood

BY RON BECHTOL

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest offered me a bonanza of opportunities for foraging in the wild.

We knew where spongy-looking morel mushrooms popped up in the spring, where the best places were to harvest the tiny wild blackberries and the even tinier, almost floral-tasting, wild strawberries. We had our favorite hiking paths for picking and eating tart-sweet red huckleberries and knew just where to go in the alpine meadows to find the ground-hugging wild blueberries. In the fall, we sometimes harvested cattail pollen to add to the flour for homemade bread.

And then, after many twists and turns, I wound up in San Antonio. At first glance, the harvesting haunts here seemed sparse at best. But as I better learned the lay of the land, opportunities emerged. Living as I now do on the South Side, the first was right outside my front door: native pecans.

Pecans and San Antonio have a long and often turbulent history. In 1938, local labor leader Emma Tenayuca led a pivotal strike of pecan shellers in search of better wages and conditions. I sympathize. Commercial pecans are hybridized these days to have thinner shells and plumper meat. The thick-shelled natives, I soon learned, are a lot of trouble — even with a rubber band-powered inertia nutcracker. Mustang grapes also grow in profusion along my street, draping from telephone lines and embracing trees, shrubs and fences. Despite the berries’ high acidity, the birds love them. Me, not so much. I didn’t attempt wine, but jelly was a requisite. Maybe it was the recipe, but the flavor didn’t seem worth the effort to deal with the near-caustic juice. But there’s one that sounds good on a blog at growingintexas.com, so maybe I’ll give them another try one day. For now, I much prefer the dewberries I discovered while foraging for grapes.

With their thorny vines, dewberries are much like the blackberries that stained my hands — and scratched my arms — in my growing up as a gatherer. They’re also more than worth the backache they give me bending to harvest along the railroad track and the hike and bike trail near my house.

Usually reaching ripeness in late April, the vines first announce themselves with white blossoms in mid-February — a good thing, as they’re easy to miss later. With a flavor far more intense than the much larger commercial varieties, these berries make sensational jam and even better pie. Try googling the recipe from James Beard’s American Cookery should you have access to them as well.

If it’s beginning to seem like harvesting in the wild is harmful to your health, let me introduce you to one more plant that fiercely defends itself: the agarita. The bushes grow wild in the Hill Country, but given thorny leaves much like those of holly, they can often be found in purpose-planted urban settings where they make terrific barrier hedges.

The small, tart berries are in the same family as the barberries used in Middle Eastern cooking, and their method of harvest is unique: traditionally, one puts a sheet on the ground and batters the bush with a stick or broom. That requires some winnowing, but the pale copper jelly the fruit produces is ample reward.

Of course, the prickly pear cactus is also commonplace in South Texas. It serves as a kind of bristly fence for the house right across the street and pops up along my morning walk. While the young paddles are important in Mexican cuisine this time of year, their spines are clearly to be avoided. The wispier whiskers of the fruit, or tunas, are less obvious but equally irritating. After an amateur-hour encounter early in my Texas foraging career, unless I get desperate for a prickly pear margarita, I’ll let others perform that harvesting as well.

Fortunately, there are plenty of benign targets of urban gathering that don’t require donning a hazmat suit. Purslane, or verdolagas in Spanish, is thought of as a common weed, growing as it does in sidewalk cracks and abandoned lots. It appears spontaneously in the joints of my brick-paved patio later in the year. Both the fleshy stems and plump, paddle-like leaves are good raw in salads, or stewed with onion, tomato and serrano chiles.

If they matured at the same time, wild onions would be a great addition to stewed verdolagas. Preferring shady, damp locations — I first spotted them alongside the nearby acequia — these scallion lookalikes are almost past their prime right now. However, if you find some, here’s a tip: grasp the hollow stem as close to the ground as possible and pull slowly. After a good wash, try throwing them on the grill alongside your favorite steak or burger. Doing a salad with that burger? The scarlet blossoms of the Turk’s Cap, tightly wound and turban-like, beg to be harvested as a colorful accent.

Proving humans have recognized the bounty around us for a long time before us modern foragers, wild onions earned a mention in a folio at the San Juan Mission, alongside other plants important to the indigenous community.

Mesquite beans also played a role in that culture, and the leathery pods simply fall to the ground, waiting for you to pick them up. That’s the easy part. My hat’s off to the Coahuiltecans who figured out how to pulverize the sturdy sheaths. A neighbor simply blitzes them into all-purpose flour in a high-powered blender. Mixed with flour, mesquite adds a warm, nutty taste to baked goods, a nostalgic reminder of the cattail pollen of my harvesting history.