The Fat and the Lean

Early spring has me thinking about the difference between how I shop for food and the flavors of foraging. The staples I get at the store are heavy on oils and carbohydrates, sugar and fat.

Sugar is the open flame of our diet, fast and sometimes destructive energy source. It rises first in the awakening circulation of barky ancients, spring sap, that morning jolt to start the cycle. Sugar in the deep throat of flowers is the sexual lure that enrolls foreign kingdoms in the mating dance of plants. Insects collect it…honey from flowers, honeydew from sap of plants. Animals are offered sweet fruit in exchange for depositing and fertilizing the next generation in new locations. Sugaring is the very earliest moment in the ritual of spring, collecting sap and drinking it directly, sweet icicles dripping of broken twigs the simplest way to do it. Or gathered in buckets and boiled down to syrup, or all the way to sugar.

Fats are the batteries where the flame can be converted and held for later use. The culmination of their green alchemy is stored, in part, as fatty seeds, dense energy to fuel new life in empty times. Animals stack green browse and the converted starch of seeds and roots in tallow strips under their skin, to carry them through the white times, or transmute them into rich suckling love, milk. If you live here, in a long winter land, you need fat to survive all year. Fall is the time for fattening on seeds and nuts. All winter the stores are drawn down, from lard or larder. Now spring is here, the race is on to repopulate, replenish. Their fall stores depleted, animals from bears to bugs cram in fast foods, sugars and more, to turn to yolk and milk for newest life.  

I’m fat. I probably have three months of reserve around my hips. I forage for pleasure, for the variety of tastes and textures and as a way to move more deeply through my world. If I want fat in my diet it comes into my larder (hmmm, the word itself speaks of a place where animal fats – or at least fat animals-are stored) from outside: vegetable oils pressed from fruits and nuts, animal oils in meats I cook or butter and other milk products.

For people who actually live on what they forage, fat can be the critical nutrient. It is the most compact way to store seasonal abundance to get through the hungry times. Which, here in Gardiner, means our long winter, just releasing its gnarly grip. The squirrels are racing around to find acorns still lying on the ground, the last seeds clinging to blanched stalks. Birds hop after me looking for grubs I turn up. About the same time as the sap began to run, small fatty fish began to shoal up the Kennebec, scruffing the surface and drawing chattering teams of gulls and swooping eagles. Now returning birds have flocked back, lean from long journeys and rushing to stake their claims. Like me, they know how far they can go before they infringe on someone else’s gathering circuit.

Invitation

That reminds me, it is time to go and ask permission from people whose lands I forage. There may be new owners, or they may have begun to use the plants they ignored. It is also a reminder to invite anyone who wants to learn more about what grows and can be gathered to meet up with me. My condition: your land, your permissions. I am not sharing my spots! Message me if you are near Gardiner and want a guided walk around your land.

Spring is a time for using up the last of the stored fats, racing to stake your territory before competitors, shoot up fast before being overshadowed. What fats are being produced now are going straight to the next generation. Unlike fall, where the season’s energy is packaged up for the taking, spring sources of vegetable fat are scarce. One to consider: as plants begin to produce pollen, those superfoods include a fair amount of fat, but pine and cattail pollen are still weeks and months away. 

Birch, alder and hazel catkins are out now. My earliest attempt at a wild meal consisted of hazel catkins ground to flour, when I was about seven, under the sway of one of the “Little House” books. It was not good. Searching for more rigorous sources, I find that catkins are considered an emergency food, nutritious but not pleasant to eat. If you want to experiment with these three types of catkins, you might try collecting and using just the pollen. When I remember in time with my pine, I collect pollen by picking the male cones just as they start to open and store them in a closed container for a day or two till they open and release the pollen, then sift the powder from the woody parts. Mix it with other flours for baking, use it as a coating for frying, or add it to a soup or stew.

Trigger Warning

The quickest and easiest sources of fat in quantity, especially this time of year, are animal. If you are vegan or even vegetarian, stop reading now unless you want to read my warnings about sharing with other meat eaters.

OK, is it just us now?

I buy luscious olive oils from an importer, avocado oils made in California, coconut oil and coconut manna. I couldn’t cook without them. I usually eat animal fat at least once a day; the wonderful yolks of a neighbor’s eggs converting unappetizing insects into soft gold; butter for my husband’s toast, creamy cheeses. If I cook meat or make soup, I may save the excess—bacon grease, schmaltz from a fatty chicken-- to use in something else. The fattest part of fish is the dark layer against the skin, its mark of freshness, quickest to spoil and taste “fishy”. Of course that’s no issue if I have been catching smelt and frying them at once, or if it is something like alewives or other herring, oozing oil and smoked till it is pure dried fishy essence. Fish and egg come together in roe, almost a distillation of oils. No wonder the spawning schools draw shoals of feeding birds.

What if it is spring and you want to forage your own fats?  There are the fish, which are traditional and cultural as well. Our local Cobbosseecontee is a Wabanaki name for where the sturgeon meet (although they are now protected, no longer to be taken for their firm flesh and fabled caviar). Winter may be lean times on land but it is a fattening season at sea and the oily fish that come in waves of spawning runs up our great rivers are greasy. Check on licensing requirements, seasons, limits. Fishing season usually opens on April 1, now is the moment.  I don’t keep up with this. Remember that a good fishing spot is as cherished and secret and not to be trespassed on as a fiddlehead patch.

When you go to the water foraging, don’t forget the spineless lives at the salty edge. Crabs, clams and lobsters, of course, and mussels and oysters (mostly farmed) are all commercially wild harvested, although you can generally get licenses for personal collecting as well. The low tide rocks are full of other edible sea creatures too, especially small whelks that I know as “wrinkles”, periwinkles and limpets. Barnacles are actually crustaceans and some varieties have a speck of meat, sort of like the top of a lobster claw. The fat of these sea creatures may be in visible pockets, or it may rise to the surface of a boil where it can be chilled and lifted off. Those noisy frogs in the fresh water pools include bullfrogs, which are large enough to be worth gigging (spearing) and eating if you want to try out frogs’ legs. Unlike some Southern states where this is a popular sport, there’s no closed season in Maine so you can go after them when you hear them.

A couple of years ago everyone seemed to be worrying about squirrels being scarce. Rodents have boom and bust population cycles, and this year is a boom year. Those rats with featherduster tails are scampering all over my woodlot, stalking me on the garden path, gouging up my tulips. Preppers have lots of instructions about how to trap and eat small rodents. Be sure to skip the moles, but voles are meaty, beaver (is there a season or are they considered pests?) and porcupine are greasy, and squirrel is traditional for Brunswick stew. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much a collection of every kind of food you might find on a day of hunting and foraging.

Invertebrates on land are a quick source of protein and fat. Right now, birds are nesting, eggs are hatching, and I want to leave the caterpillars for them. When I turn up fat grubs while gardening, I let the crows and robins pick them off in hopes that later in the season they’ll clean other grubs off my cabbage. I want meat-eating birds in my bushes. I’ve eaten mopane worms and palm grubs, large fat caterpillars the size of your thumb with a vaguely shrimpy taste. I’ve sampled dehydrated earthworms, chocolate covered ants, dried crickets, but passed on the crunchy tarantula—too much like someone’s pet. I’ve eaten locusts (the grasshopper kind) sauted in pepper sauce, and land snails in peanut stew. And I used to crave escargot awash with garlic butter. Know these exist. That’s all I have to say on the subject.