Nettle Soup

Yesterday morning Richard Mabey's book Food for Free arrived in the post from play.com. Paca and myself had been intrigued ever since spotting the book in the National Trust gift shop on Holy Island. It is a most interesting little volume, giving details of various different edible plants which can be gathered from commons, hedgerows and gardens, and some ideas of how to use said plants once collected. Seeing as nettles are fairly prolific in my back garden, and usually easy to identify, and had a very proper-looking recipe attached to them, we decided to begin our first foray into self-sufficiency by making everybody some nettle soup for tea.

Note that I said nettles are usually easy to identify. Perhaps this is often because you've brushed a little too close to the plant, and ended up getting stung. Well, the moment we needed to identify them (who knows what untold dangers could be caused by serving bramble soup, or unidentified garden herb soup, by mistake?) we were both seized by irrational doubt, such that we forbore to pick any until we'd got two or three stings each, just to be sure...

You can hold a nettle plant without getting stung, as long as you only grasp the centre part of the leaf between two fingers - the stingy white hairs are only on the stems and around the edges of the leaves. However, actually picking a sufficient quantity for soup might have been a bit painful without taking some precautionary measures. I wore gloves and used scissors; Paca picked carefully, with the aid of a tea-towel. It didn't take long to gather the requisite 'four handfuls of nettle-tops', and we headed back into the kitchen.

The first step of the recipe is to "Strip the nettles from the thicker stalks, and wash". That seemed pretty tricky to us, without resorting to rubber gloves, so we contented ourselves with swishing them around in a colander for a bit, and carefully pulling out some of the stems. Once added, with chopped potato, to the fried onion in the pan, the nettles began to wilt, very like one would expect spinach to do. Indeed, as we added the vegetable stock, the nettles continued to behave like spinach. They reduced a great deal, and began to come apart just about enough for one bowl of soup not to end up with all the nettles in it. However, to give the soup a smoother texture we decided to liquidise it a little bit anyway, which turned out to be a good decision.

For seasoning we used nutmeg (recommended by the recipe), as well as pepper and a little ginger and cinnamon (not mentioned in the recipe, but good anyway). The potato made the soup nice and thick, and along with the flavours of stock, onion and seasoning the nettles were rather delicious. Other members of the family were somewhat dubious of our new delicacy before tasting it, but I think in general it was found acceptable - certainly there wasn't any left over! Nettles are apparently very nutritious, containing lots of iron and protein. To me they do taste a bit like spinach - I think better than spinach. And quite apart from that, I'm sure knowing some of the ingredients to be gathered from your own garden will always make a meal taste better.