Most of the foods from the Point of Virginia that I like best are wild things that grow here naturally. It feels natural to think of them in the order they appear on the calendar.
1. Maple syrup
All maple trees have sweet sap that can be boiled down into syrup. Acer saccharum, the Sugar Maple, which grows best further north, tends to have the most sugary, least "mapley" flavor. It does grow in Virginia, but not so abundantly as Acer rubrum, A. nigrum, A. saccharinum, and the introduced A. platanoides. Syrup fom these trees used to be considered less valuable because it tastes more "mapley." If you like a distinctive maple flavor, this is good news, because your woodlot probably has enough of these maple species that are big enough to be tapped for syrup. (Only tap trees that are considerably wider than your five-gallon bucket.)
The secret to harvesting maple sap south of Vermont is that the sap rises earlier in the year. Sometimes it starts in the January thaw. Often we get a freeze in between maple sap harvests.
The secret to converting that watery, just faintly sweet, sap into syrup is abundant supplies of cheap fuel and patience. Approximately forty gallons of sap make a pint of syrup. You'll be boiling down sap for days. Indigenous people boiled sap in big pots over open fires, but you can economize a little bit on patience by putting a good wood stove in a shed.
2. Rock lettuce
This aquatic plant grows whenever the water is not actually freezing. It tastes cool, fresh, and juicy, like the very best leaf lettuce, only better. It grows only in minimally polluted streams, so most people no longer have it. If you can find it, you're blessed.
3. Morel mushrooms
Like other mushrooms, they grow as a big underground network of fungus roots, popping up their reproductive parts when the weather is warm and damp. Unlike some other mushrooms, morels "bloom" above ground only once a year, usually in April.
If you have a morel patch in your wood lot, you know it. The question is whether you want to be the first to pounce and devour, or want to share the pleasure with friends.
Another morel fun fact: Nobody in the Point of Virginia actually says "moh-rell." Every family seems to have its own nickname for these mushrooms. "Sponge mushrooms" seems logical but is not really ideal, because it includes the Great Sponge Mushroom, which is mildly toxic. My elders called them "mullets," which I've been told was typical for Irish families. Many people in town call them "dry land fish." You do soak them in saltwater, roll them in cornmeal, and fry them like fish, and the process gives them a flavor that reminds people of fish--I wonder why?
Another: If you're one of those European types who like to drink alcohol with meals, you will not enjoy morels. They contain a phytochemical that reacts with alcohol in the stomach to have a purgative effect.
Another: If the land where they grew has been sprayed with glyphosate or even exposed to glyphosate vapor drift, don't eat morels. They absorb and retain the poison and will bring on whatever glyphosate reactions you have.
Another: Chanterelles are another unmistakable-looking wild mushroom that grow here. Many people rave over their flavor. My family never picked or ate them...so I still wouldn't know!
4. Violets
Picking violets only makes them bloom more exuberantly, so it's nice to know that they're safe and healthy to eat. Some people like to candy violet blossoms in sugar, which at least looks pretty. I like to pick and nibble on up to ten blossoms at a time, out in the not-a-lawn. Depending on when and where they grew violets can be super nutritious, such that overindulgence could even cause an imbalance, so use moderation.
5. Strawberries
When nature intended strawberries to be eaten, they're red all the way through, and being warmed by the sun brings out their sweetness. You don't need to do another thing to them except wash off any soil that may adhere.
In May, however, when both "June bearers" and "ever-bearers" produce the greatest number of berries, you may have enough berries to freeze, and after freezing and thawing you will want to do something creative with them. They still make a delicious dessert cut up and served in their own rich red juice (try not to pick or eat strawberries before they're red all the way through) with just a sprinkle of sugar to compensate for what's been lost to time, but people tend to like to play with frozen strawberries. So serve them on shortcakes, or stir them right into the batter of layer cakes, or stir them into gelatin and serve them as pie. (Gluten-free pies can have cornflake or crisp rice crumb crusts, but strawberries go well with crushed nut crusts.)
Not so much fun fact: strawberries have a somewhat spongy structure, with seeds growing right out through the surface and no clearly defined peel, and they soak up glyphosate like little sponges. If they've been exposed to vapor drift, don't eat them.
6. Blueberries and Huckleberries
Technically blueberries and huckleberries belong to different species; they don't crossbreed and have different numbers of seeds inside each berry. Who cuts into these tiny fruits to count the berries? An older explanation was that blueberries grow on bushes you bought from the seed company and planted and tended, whereas huckleberries just grow wild on the hills. Except, of course, that some people transplant wild huckleberries into gardens, and sometimes feral blueberry bushes grow on the hills near the sites of houses that burned down or fell in long ago. Anyway they taste good and are good for the eyes.
7. Cherries
Wild cherries are small and seedy and useful mostly as medicine. When they've been boiled soft and the seeds have been sieved out, wild cherries turn to a thick pulpy syrup that is mixed with honey, poured out on platters, left to firm up between sheets of waxed paper, then cut up in little lozenge shapes and eaten as cough lozenges.
Cherries that grew on trees someone bought from the seed company are bigger and juicier and can be eaten as fruit, though it's nice to cut them in half and make sure they're not harboring any tiny insect pests. Fresh cherries need no sugar. Split, pit, devour.
Cherries also freeze well, or they can be cooked thick and canned as "preserves," for use in pies later in the year. Cherry pies do need sugar. Our local honey tends to have a strong flavor of its own on which I've never been keen. Cherries have enough flavor authority to stand up to local honey, so you can use honey in a cherry pie I'm likely to pronounce good...at least if none of the flowers the bees visited had been exposed to glyphosate, you could.
8. Wineberries
Wineberries are a lazy picker's ideal for raspberries--bigger, brighter, sweeter, growing on those ferocious-looking brambles that discourage most insects.
Another fun fact about raspberries: They come in three colors--red, black, and yellow. My favorites are the yellow ones.
9. Tomatoes
Properly grown, vine-ripened tomatoes are too soft to be sold in supermarkets. Like strawberries, they have more flavor (and nutrients) than the kind you can buy in supermarkets. If not exposed to any poison spray vapor drift they don't need to be peeled--if anything the peels may help the fruit pulp cohere--and are best eaten from a bowl, with a spoon.
"Tomato" may be a name for a shade of red, but tomatoes can also be orange, yellow, pink, or even deep aubergine ("purple") when ripe. They also come in a range of sizes and shapes. People in the Point of Virginia usually plant a mix of familiar and novelty tomatoes, partly to get a mix of resistance to different insects and fungi--if you plant twenty different kinds of tomatoes you should at least get to eat one kind--and partly to have a topic for "small talk."
Many people have favorite kinds of tomatoes, and although I like any fully ripe, soft tomato, lightly salted, I should mention that my father's favorite was Yellow Pink Centers. These are wonderfully ugly tomatoes. They grow in a flattened oblong shape with deep wrinkles along slicing lines that will, if followed, yield uneven slices. The predominant color of the rind is yellow, when the fruits are ripe, with a deep pink blush under the skin near the core, but green, orange, and red patches are usually also present. The fruit pulp is extremely delicate. The flavor is sweet; salting these tomatoes is like salting melons, something people do only to emphasize the sweet taste. Vine-ripened red tomatoes are both the predominant flavor and the "dressing" in salads, but Yellow Pink Centers really do seem to need a bowl and spoon all to themselves.
10. Cucumbers
Almost as easy to grow as beans, cucumbers ripen at the same time as tomatoes and work well with tomatoes in salads. You can buy varieties that look and taste similar to the ones sold in supermarkets but it's always worth planting a few "lemon cucumbers," which are short, thick, pale cucumbers--they don't really look like lemons but they invite comparisons--with a special flavor of their own.
We're not even halfway through the growing season yet, but ten favorites ought to be enough.
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