Slightly Sooty Salad: Leafy Green, Eco-Clean

We took the ferry to Governors Island to watch the World Cup final. Despite the fairly large crowd, the noise level was not high, and the “parade grounds,” where they had the screen to watch the game, were buzzing with brightly colored, hand-sized, hovering and zipping dragonflies. Spotting dragonflies in NYC is probably fairly common at this time of year, but in the grand scheme of life here in Brooklyn, we don’t get to see them a lot. In a way that is similar to my feelings about fireflies and bats, I feel like dragonflies have a kind of celebrity status in the city. Speaking of fireflies and bats, we saw some of each on a single night in early July right by the playground in Sunset Park. What a time of year this is: the insects, the bats, the birds, the people, the plants — it’s all in full swing; a riot of heat, leaves, wings and legs, bristled and not. The plants are climbing on top of each other to get to the sun. I saw greenery from Green-Wood Cemetery reaching out ambitiously through the fence into the air above the steps at the 36th Street subway entrance. The ants are working mightily to expand their territory to include our kitchen.

This is a time of year when fruit production also starts to peak. I’m not writing about edibles this month, but keep an eye out in the neighborhood this August for super sour but delicious wild black cherries, tropical-looking kousa dogwood fruit, cornelian cherries, chokeberries and, I’m sure, a whole lot more that I don’t know about.

This month’s article started during an early July camping trip with family and friends. While camping, I frequently find myself sweaty, sticky and covered in dirt following some chore or just cooking dinner. We don’t always have shower facilities available, and I don’t feel great about the effects on the natural environment of my soaping up in a stream or even just in a bed of leaves somewhere. So when we got home from our trip, I went looking through the internet archives for soap-making plant possibilities. There are many. Several plants are so well known for soap making that they are called such things as soapnut, soapwort, soapberry and soapbark … you get the idea. I wasn’t aware of anywhere I could easily get any of those plants, so I continued the search. I came upon a post about the horse chestnut tree as a source of saponins. I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of DIY soap-making potential, but from what I’ve gleaned so far, saponins are a type of surfactant, a component of soap that reduces the surface tension of water and can help remove oils and dirt. There are many large horse chestnut trees thriving in Green-Wood Cemetery.

The nuts from horse chestnut trees are commonly picked when ripe, removed from their husks, cut up and heated in water to release their saponins. The nuts aren’t ready at this time of year, but the leaves are also known to contain saponins. On a walk through Green-Wood, we volunteered to prune a handful of leaves and twigs from a few of the lowest-hanging horse chestnut branches threatening cemetery-goers’ eyes and hats. Following suggestions we had gleaned from a few different online sources, we brought the leaves home and chopped them up. We put about 2 cups of chopped leaves into 2 cups of water in a pot and heated it at a low simmer for about 20 minutes. Then we took it off the heat and let it cool. We squeezed the liquid out of the wet leaves into a bowl. I could feel the slippery texture one would expect of soap with my fingers, but it was not as viscous as I expected. I tried a slightly different method with a few leaves that hadn’t been cooked — I just crushed the leaves and rubbed them on my skin after wetting them. This crushing and rubbing seemed to do a better job of releasing the saponins. I think if I were to try again, I would mash and crush the leaves prior to cooking them and squeezing the liquid out. Either way, it was an interesting experiment, and I would like to read more about traditional soap-making practices before trying again with the horse chestnuts themselves someday.

Warning: Horse chestnuts, like all other parts of the tree, are poisonous if eaten.

Feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions at: slightlysooty@gmail.com