Slightly Sooty Salad: Meet a new plate mate

I have this dream every so often. I’m in a place that appears to be our apartment, but then I realize that there are huge, previously unexplored rooms — numerous sunlit spaces that are so large they are more like a wing than a room. The dream is accompanied by a feeling of excitement and possibility.

In a big city like ours, we inevitably have neighbors we don’t have any relationship with. Sometimes it feels like even outside on the street, there is some unseen barrier separating us. But then one day, we strike up a conversation and something changes — possibilities open up, an exploration begins. Our neighbor could be a person, a dog, or maybe it’s a plant.

I recently learned that we can eat the delicate, leafy, light green, disc-shaped fruits of elm trees. They’re called samaras. My kids and I taste the elm fruits in the park. We taste them after chilling them and cleaning them. We add them to our chicken soup. I look up other people’s recipes to get more ideas on how we might use them. Then I put a calendar reminder in my phone so we don’t forget to look for them next year during the last couple of weeks of April. As we bike our usual paths around Brooklyn, we find elm trees that we didn’t know about and add them to a mental map of places to visit again next year. We compare the taste of the different trees and remember our favorites. It’s the beginning of a new relationship. We’ve opened up a small but tasty new wing in our space here.

The samaras appear in clusters on branch tips in mid-April, following an elm tree’s flowering cycle and before any of the tree’s leaves appear. After a couple of weeks, the leaves appear and the samaras start to dry and turn brown. They are still edible but reportedly taste better after winnowing away the dry material to get at the very small seeds inside. The window of availability for the fresh green samaras is fairly short, maybe a couple of weeks long. The samaras of all the different types of elms are edible.

The American elm’s samaras aren’t the smallest of all the elms, but they are a bit smaller and fuzzier than some of the other neighborhood elms. Regardless, before the spring season, we waited with anticipation to sample the fruits of the massive, old American elm at the center of Sunset Park. Maybe this was just an off year for this particular tree. Or because of the tree’s age or the constant foot traffic compressing the soil around its roots, its samaras were produced in much smaller quantities compared to the other elms we have found in the neighborhood. The American elm near the Seventh Avenue and 41st Street park entrance also produced relatively few fruits this year, but it competes for sunlight with a number of other very large trees. It also gets a great deal of foot and paw traffic underneath its branches. There is a wych elm, also known as Scotch elm, along Green-Wood Cemetery’s fence on 35th Street that produced prolifically this year. Its seeds were large and soft and very fresh tasting.

Living in a densely populated city, we might not have a great deal of personal physical space, but there are other kinds of spaces we can explore. Anonymous plant flesh hanging from the branches of nearby trees was revealed to be tasty and nutritious and transformed, in a small way, our view of our physical environment.