Cattails, Mother Earth’s grocery store

The cattail is a very important wild plant. It is readily found, and it has a variety of uses that can be used at different times of the year. A stand of cattails in the spring and early summer is like finding a wild supermarket. It is easy to recognize a cattail stand. In winter you can see the white dense, furry, cigar-shaped over wintered seed heads standing atop very long, stout stalks, in the summer the rich brown cigar shaped cattails can be readily seen, and even the young shoots that emerge in the spring are easy to recognize because last year’s stalks help to provide positive cattail plant identification. The immature sword-like, pointed leaves, with parallel veins, can resemble other wetland plants that are poisonous, so be sure, if you want to pick the young shoots for food, that you know what you are picking.  Young cattail shoots resemble non-poisonous calamus (Acorus calamus), and poisonous daffodil (Amaryllidaceae) and Iris (Iris species) shoots, which have similar leaves. If a stand is still standing by last year’s cottony seed heads, you know you have the right plant. 

In the spring, the cattail shoot has an odorless, tender, white, inner core that tastes sweet, mild, and pleasant, which is far cry from the bitter poisonous plants, or the spicy, fragrant calamus.  Also, none of the look-alikes grows more than a few feet tall, so by mid-spring, the much larger cattail becomes unmistakable, even for beginners. Cattails grow in marshes, swamps, ditches, stagnant water, and fresh or slightly brackish water worldwide. One way to test the young shoots to see if they are edible is to break off a piece of the shoot, and rub the juice on sensitive parts of your body like inner arm or wrist to see if that area turns red. You can also rub a small amount on your lips to see if it tastes bitter and in a few minutes makes your lips numb. If those things happen, IT IS NOT A CATTAIL shoot. If you have any doubts, just DO NOTT attempt using it for food.

By late spring, the light green leaves reach nearly nine feet tall. They form a sheath where they tightly embrace the stalk’s base. The leaves hide their new flower head until it nears maturity. You can peel them back to reveal it. The plant is so primitive it dates back to the time of the dinosaurs. The male and female flowers are separate on the stiff, two-parted flower head, and the pollen-producing male is always on top, while the seed-bearing female is on the bottom.  This arrangement is effective because the male part withers away when its job is done, while the female part remains connected to the rest of the plant until the seeds have matured and are dispersed. If you collect shoots your hands will become covered with a sticky, mucilaginous jelly. You can scrape this jelly off the plant and place it in a container to be used as an okra-like thickening effect when added to soups. Before the flower forms, the shoots, prized as “Cossack’s asparagus” in Russia, are said to be fantastic. They can be peeled and eaten well into the summer.

The shoot provides beta-carotene, niacin, riboflavin, thiamin, potassium, phosphorus, and vitamin C.  A few large, late-spring stalks will provide enough delicious food for a meal. Some stalks grow tall, and become inedible and fibrous with developing flowers by late spring, although just before the summer solstice, you can often gather tender shoots, immature flower heads, and pollen at the same time. The male portion of the immature, the green flower head, can be clipped off to be eaten. Steam or simmer these immature flower heads for ten minutes. They taste a little bit like their distant relative, corn. They even have a central cob-like core. Because they are dry, you can serve it with a topping of sauce, seasoned oil, or butter.

Just before the summer solstice, when the male flowers ripen, they produce considerable quantities of golden pollen. People pay outrageous prices in health stores for tiny capsules of bee pollen, which is a source of minerals, enzymes, protein, and energy. Cattail pollen beats the commercial variety in flavor, energy content, freshness, nutrition, and price. To collect the pollen, wait for a few calm days, so your harvest isn’t scattered by wind. Bend the flower heads into a large paper bag and shake them gently. Keep the bag’s opening as narrow as possible, so the pollen does not blow away. Use the pollen as golden flour in baking breads, muffins, pancakes, or waffles. It doesn’t rise, and it’s time-consuming to collect in quantity, so I generally mix it with at least three times as much whole-grain flour. The pollen raw can also be eaten. It can be sprinkled on yogurt, fruit shakes, oatmeal, and salads.

Once they are fertilized, the female flowers transform into the familiar brown “cigars” also called candlewicks, punks, ducktails, and marsh beetles. These punks consist of thousands of tiny developing seeds. They whiten over the winter after the leaves die, and the cycle repeats. Cattails grow in dense stands. Like most colonial plants, they arise from rhizomes, thick stems that grow in the mud. A cattail stand is like a branching shrub lying on its side under the mud, with only the leaves and blossoms visible. The heart of the peeled cattail shoot is like a combination of zucchini and cucumbers, they add a refreshing texture and flavor to salads. Added to soup towards the end of cooking, they retain a refreshing crunchiness. They are excellent when used in stir-fry dishes, and they are even suitable for use in sandwiches. Harvest cattail shoots after dry weather, when the ground is solid, in the least muddy locations. Select the largest shoots that haven’t begun to flower, and use both hands to separate the outer leaves from the core, all the way to the base of the plant. Grab the inner core with both hands, as close to the base as possible, and pull it out. Peel and discard the outermost layers of leaves from the top down, until you reach the edible part, which is soft enough to pinch through with your thumbnail. There are more layers to discard toward the top, so you must do more peeling there. Cut off completely tough upper parts with a pocketknife or shears in the field. In this way, you’ll have less to carry.

Our ancestors not only ate the nutritious cattails, they used them for medicine and wove them into useful items. They applied the jelly from between the young leaves on wounds, sores, boils, carbuncles, and other external inflammations to take away some of the pain. Besides its medicinal uses, the dried leaves were also woven and twisted into dolls and toy animals for children, much like cornhusk dolls. Cattail leaves were also used to thatch roofs and cover walls, they were woven and made into footwear, and they were used to make mats. Archeologists have excavated cattail mats over 10,000 years old from caves.

When the punks are no longer edible and their pollen is gone, they make good “punks,” to support a slowly burning flame. This produces a smoke that drives insects away. The fluffy, white seeds were once used for stuffing blankets, pillows and toys. They were put inside moccasins and around cradles, for additional warmth. If you want to try to use it for batting, NOTE: The fluffy seeds need to be enclosed in batting or something like it to prevent them from coming through the material. Once they come through the material and touch your skin, they will produce hives on any parts touched. The fluff may cause a skin reaction similar to uticaria (hives). Environmentally, cattails greatly help to improve water and soil quality. They are able render organic pollution harmless, and fix atmospheric nitrogen, bringing it back into the food chain. They have even been planted along the Nile River to reduce soil salinity. The plant’s root systems help to prevent erosion, and the plants themselves are often home to many insects, birds and amphibians. The Creator appointed guardian of the marsh, the Red-winged blackbird and other bird’s nest in the safety the reeds provide. In North America, cattails are increasingly being taken over by the invasive purple loosestrife, and man, too, destroys many cattail beds. Since cattails do such a good job environmentally, I hope stricter protection will be offered this plant the Creator has given to help keep Mother Earth healthy.

Here is a recipe with cattail shoots that you may want to try:  You will need

2-1/2 cups almonds

10 cups of water

2 cups of thinly sliced cattail shoots

1/4 cup of finely chopped fresh spearmint leaves or other mint leaves

The juice of half a lemon

1. Cover the almonds with water and soak, refrigerated, 6 hours to overnight. 2. Puree the soaked almonds, about 2 cups at a time, with about 3 cups of the water at a time in a blender until all the almonds have been pureed. 3. Pour the almond-water puree into a colander lined with cheesecloth or thin nylon fabric over a bowl. Twist the top of the cloth and squeeze the remaining water. 4. Discard the pulp and mix the remaining ingredients with the almond milk. Serve chilled.

The following are directions and what you will need to make cattail mats:

Some fresh cattail leaves

A large piece of corrugated cardboard

Some thumbtacks

Scissors

Glue

How to make the mats:

Step 1: Lay some freshly picked long leaves side by side on a large sheet of cardboard.

Step 2: Thumbtack one end of each leaf to the cardboard to hold them in place. Make these the width of your mat.

Step 3: Weave leaves (one a at a time) in and out of these tacked leaves (pull them up to the tacked end to keep the weave tight). When your mat is long enough, stop.

Step 4: When you finish weaving, trim the ends with scissors and let the mat dry in an area free of moisture. Drying may take several days. Dab glue under each cut end. This will hold the mat together.

The edges can be sewn - a binding can be added, or they can be used as is - just tack the end at the corners so they will not come apart.