A Spicy Story

In North America, it is an invasive and obnoxious alien weed. But 6,000 years ago prehistoric man in today’s Denmark and Germany was using it to spice up his food. Traces of garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata, has been found on the inside of pottery shards along with fatty residues of meat and fish.

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Writing in the journal PLoS One, the scientists make the case that garlic mustard contains little nutritional value and therefore must have been used to flavour the foods. The biennial of the Brassica family arrived here with pioneer settlers. Today it is considered one of the worst exotic plants in Canada. With bright green leaves and small white flowers its identity is easily confirmed by crushing any part of the plant, releasing the distinctive garlic odour. Vacant city lots, rundown gardens, rural roadsides, woodland edges – there seems scarcely a square inch of ground this aggressive invasive is not willing to occupy at the expense of more desirable tenants. Surprisingly, the many enthusiasts of edible wild plants make no mention of the all too available garlic mustard. Oliver Perry Medsger, professor emeritus of nature education at Pennsylvania State College, ignored it when writing back in 1939. A search of the pages of classic The Edible Wild (1971) by Canadian couple Berndt Berglund and Clare E. Bolsby likewise reveals nary a single seed. Garlic mustard does enter into the picture with the Field Guide to North American Edible Wild Plants (1982) by Thomas S. Elias and Peter A. Dykeman who reassuringly note that there are no poisonous look-alikes.

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Yet prehistoric Europeans obviously relished the plant as the study led by Dr. Hayley Saul of the University of York, England has shown. Researchers scraped the charred deposits from pottery cooking pots and subjected it to scientific examination. These deposits contained the microscopic traces of plant-based silica, called phytoliths, which are used to identify the plants from which they came, in this case Alliaria petiolata. So why have scrapings from cooking pots only recently been commenced to be used to identify their long-ago contents? The reason is a revelation. In the past before such artifacts were consigned to the display cases and storerooms of museums, they were carefully washed and cleaned to remove every last trace of dirty deposits. Sic transit gloria mundi . . . Dr. Saul believes there is more behind this discovery. In an interview with the BBC, she explained that the ancient chefs must have crushed the seeds. “Actually to get the flavour out you have to crush it really. I suspect that if they hadn’t been crushing the seeds, we would probably find more intact seeds in the residues.” The plant and its seeds continued to find its way into the kitchens of northwestern Europe. And not only for culinary purposes but medical ones as well: Nicholas Culpepper in his Complete Herbal of about 1640 wrote:

It is an herb of Mercury. It warms the stomach and causes digestion: the juices boiled with honey, is as good as hedge mustard for the cough, to cut and expectorate the tough phlegm. The seed bruised and boiled in wine, is a good remedy for the wind colic or the stone, if drunk warm; it is often given to women troubled with the mother, both to drink, and seed put into a cloth, and applied while it is warm, is of singular good use. The leaves also, or the seed boiled, is good to be use in clysters to ease the pains of the stone. The green leaves are held to be good to heal the ulcers on the legs.

Much later in the last of what might be termed the classic herbals, Mrs. M. Grieve (1931) recommended that, “The leaves used to be taken internally as a soporific and deobstruct, and externally were applied antiseptically to gangrenes and ulcers. The juice of the leaves taken alone or boiled into syrup is found serviceable in dropsy,” adding that, “the seeds, when stuffed up the nose, excite sneezing.” Telling though she also explained:

Country people at one time used the plant in sauces, with bread and butter, salted meat and with lettuce in salads, hence it acquired also the name of Sauce Alone. The herb, when eaten as a salad, warms the stomach and strengthens the digestive faculties.

Yet another British lover of the country- and sea-side produce, Pamela Michaels put to paper what she had learnt commencing as a ‘land girl’ during the Second World War in her classic and beautifully illustrated All Good Things Around Us (1980). Under garlic mustard she notes that long country use had given rise to several alternate names: Hedge Garlic, Jack-by-the-Hedge, Poor Man’s Mustard and, like Culpepper and Mrs. Grieve, Sauce All-Alone. It appears that a possible lesson to be learnt about this vigorous invasive is if you can’t beat it then, like prehistoric man, eat it.

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