The season for wild edible greens is winding down now, at least here at the house above 11,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies. This fact posed a challenge when Cattail Bob Seebeck invited Gregg and I to attend a potluck at his house, since I was determined to bring a dish featuring wild edible plants in his honor. Thankfully, we had nearly a mason jar full of pennycress seeds on hand. Hoping to include a wild green as well, I took a walk around the house--and that's when the peppergrass occurred to me.
I speak here of Lepidium spp., as presented in Cattail Bob's book, Best-Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado and the Rockies (1998). Peppergrass appears to be a hardy plant, as the plants in the back yard have survived several frosts and snowfalls to date. The seeds and leaves have a spicy, peppery flavor that work well raw in salads or cooked in soups and stir fries, although the peppery flavor diminishes with cooking. As Cattail Bob explains, peppergrass will often produce a second crop of small plants in August and September, which explains why we still have some growing in the yard.
I harvested seven or eight sprigs containing leaves and seedpods and meticulously stripped them into a bowl, discarding the stalks but keeping all the tiny leaves and seedpods. These I added to a milk-based red potato salad along with a healthy dose of pennycress seeds. Cattail Bob said it was the best potato salad he had ever tasted! (But really, how could he think otherwise? It had two of his self-proclaimed "best-tasting wild plants" in it.)
Peppergrass goes by other common names including poor-man's pepper and cow cress (Peterson Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants), field cress and pepper mustard (Best-Tasting Wild Plants). Cattail Bob explains that there are many species of peppergrass, not all of which are edible. "They are not toxic," he states, "just inedible." As a general rule, if it looks like a peppergrass but doesn't taste good, don't eat any more of it.
In an entry on peppergrass in The Herbwife's Kitchen, the herbwife/blogger confesses to using the word loosely to refer to all cresses in her yard, sometimes confusing the genus Lepidium with Cardamine, before concluding that she will henceforth use "peppergrass" for Lepidium and "bittercress" for Cardamine. The point is that there can be some confusion--oftentimes having to do with regional terminology--around the use of common names for a given plant. This is another good argument for making sure you have a positive identification based on a plant guide or guides before sampling a presumed wild edible plant. Insofar as it relates to peppergrass versus bittercress, however, the midwife concludes: "In any case, they're all tasty in salad."
I also found it interesting that peppergrass shares its nomenclature as a mustard family member not only with other wild mustards, but also with broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage.
According to the Peterson guide, peppergrass leaves contain Vitamin C and A, iron, and protein. It can be found growing in disturbed areas and those of human occupation. In our yard, it grows in the patch of dirt we trucked up from a lower elevation and spread on top of the rocky, sandy soil. Gregg and I like the leaves and seeds in pretty much anything. In addition to the potato salad, we've had it in stir fries, eggs, and fried with onions and served alongside bratwurst.
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