Cattails in Soup

[bentherebfor]

In the cookbook Charlie Trotter's Vegetables, there is a recipe for a soup that I am very interested in making. The recipe, however, calls for cattails. Never before have I seen a recipe that calls for cattails, and I am unsure of how to use them and where to get them.

For starters, if there are cattails growing near my house, are they the kind of cattails I can use? Is that safe?

Secondly, once I do have the said cattails, how do I prepare them? Exactly what part of the plant do I use? The recipe calls for 1 cup cleaned cattails.

How do I clean them?

Please Help!

~Ben

[fifi]

My sister has a Euell Gibbons book, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, that talks about preparing and eating cattails. I don't have the book here and I read about the cattails so long ago that I don't remember the details. So, I am not much help. But it is still available from Amazon. (Don't forget to click on that eGullet friendly Amazon link if you are interested.)

[fifi]

I found this web site.

[bentherebfor]

And in what season do the become ripe?

Can you replace them with anything easier to find?

[fifi]

What we have here now on the Texas Gulf Coast are fully grown cattails, the seed heads are brown but till tight. We have them in ditches and such all over the place. I don't know if I have ever eaten them, though, so I don't know about substitutes. (I say I don't know because you can never tell what my sister will put in a salad. Chickweed is popular with her. )

[Maison Rustique]

I asked my daughter the biologist/botanist about this, as I'd never heard of anyone eating cattails. Here is her reply:

Whoa!  I've never heard of eating cattails.  I do know that the rhizomes (thick roots) are starchy.  The long green blades are soft and new in early spring, and a lot tougher by the end of summer.  If someone's wondering where to harvest them, I would avoid harvesting them from wetlands and/or drainages that receive runoff from residential areas, paved roads, golf courses, or other sites where pesticides and petroleum-based chemicals are likely to be present and washed away by rainwater or irrigation systems.  That rules out most cattails near urban and suburban areas.  Cattails and many other wetland plants are very good at removing toxins from water and soil and storing them in their tissues.  That's why you see them in wastewater treatment wetlands, like the ones constructed in Laguna Niguel.

So, eat them at your own risk!

[sparrowgrass]

I useta be a state park naturalist, and I did lots of wild food forays. The recipe probably is calling for the seed heads--the thingies that turn brown when they are ripe. Ripe is inedible--you need to get them when they are just tiny and green.

To substitute, I would use baby corn--similar taste and texture.