Caucasus x Appalachia | SMILAX
This particular blog post is an interesting one because the plant I’m diving into is not nearly as recognizable as the other plants featured in my Caucasus x Appalachia series. Unlike grape, plum, and walnut, smilax is probably not in many people’s vocabulary. The word seems more fitting for a Suessian character than a plant. Smilax is actually an entire genus of plants. They are woody, often thorny, brambly plants that form dense thickets and sprawl up trees. A common name for them is greenbrier, which is a very accurate and practical American English designation. In the Republic of Georgia, it is called ekala, referring to their native Smilax excelsa. Here in Appalachia and the greater U.S. nobody touches the stuff except to eradicate it. But in Georgia, smilax is a commonly consumed wild food. It is a staple of Georgian countryside cuisine, gracing many tables as a side dish and filling up glass jars for winter preservation.
SMILAX AROUND THE WORLD
There are over 300 species of smilax. They can be found in many parts of the world, including temperate and tropical climates. Smilaxes have edible and medicinal qualities, so you’ll find a range of panglobal ethnobotanical uses. It’s pretty neat looking into all the different ways that smilaxes are used in various regions and cultures. For example, the roots of Jamaican smilax (Smilax ornata), popularly known as sarsaparilla, are used to make the sarsaparilla drink and other root beers. In China, smilaxes are used in prepared dishes and traditional Chinese medicine.
The eastern side of North America is home to over a dozen smilaxes. Here are a few smilaxes that are native to my home state of Tennessee:
- Smilax bona-nox - saw greenbrier
- Smilax glauca - cat greenbrier
- Smilax laurifolia - laurel greenbrier
- Smilax rotundifolia - roundleaf greenbrier
Native Americans traditionally used smilaxes for food, medicine, and basketmaking. Yet in present-day America, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone aware of this plant group and its qualities. It wasn’t until I travelled across the globe to the Republic of Georgia that I learned I could even eat a smilax. The following summer I took a stroll around the farm. My jaw dropped seeing just how many native smilaxes were thriving around me. The heart races a bit when recognizing a free buffet of food, doesn’t it? That primal, pupil-dilating sensation that kicks in from millenia of evolutionary adaptation. My eyes adjusted to the new pattern, the pattern of a smilax, and just like that I started to see them everywhere.
What was once a jungle of weedy vines became another plant for me to cherish, like so many other wild edibles. I understand the modern American attitude toward plants like smilax - why vigorous (i.e. aggressive), prickly, brambly plants are maligned as nuisance plants. Yet perspective often shifts toward the positive once we can attach value to something. We humans are funny, fickle creatures, aren’t we? Now I’m not necessarily advocating for planting them. That’s a choice for the most chaotic of gardeners. But I would encourage anyone to give a go at foraging for them and embracing a smilax’s inherent chaos in the wild. For no matter where you find yourself in the world, you’re likely to encounter a smilax. And that means access to free, wild food.
HARVESTING SMILAX
So what part do you eat exactly? The supple portion at the apex of the vine. Smilax becomes woody as it matures. It’s the new growth at the end that is food quality. Since these plants are climbers, it can take a bit of effort to harvest. If the smilax has already grown up a tree, you might have to pull it down to access the supple end. Young plants are easier to harvest because they are likely to be within reach. Late spring/early summer is the best time to find and easily access a large quantity of these tender tips. But as long as the weather is warm, there will always be some smilax growth, so you can harvest indeterminately.
Once you’ve handled a few smilax shoots, you get better at knowing where to break off the bit you want. Start by bending portions of the vine. You’ll feel when it gets more pliable and less woody. Visually, it looks more tender as well. When you break off the supple tip, it should snap, kind of like a bean pod. Depending on the size and type of smilax, the pliant portion could be a few inches or considerably longer. I’ve picked smilax shoots as long as my forearm. You can always trim off the woody bits after harvesting, too.
Taste can vary depending on the species. Ideally, you want to find the ones that are most like asparagus in form and flavor. You can nibble the raw shoot to judge its flavor. Expect some level of bitterness. Cooking minimizes that bitterness, fortunately. Time of year also influences flavor.
PREPARING SMILAX
I would’ve had no clue how to harvest and cook these things without some in-the-field learning from my Georgian host, Mariam. We went on so many amazing day hikes - climbing mountains, exploring caves, visiting farms - all to marvel at the flora and landscapes of the lower Caucasus. But when it came to ekala, we didn’t have to go far. It was growing mere feet from the door of her Imeretian country home. Presumably it was Smilax excelsa. We gathered a basket of these young ekala shoots. Then Mariam and her mother showed me how to make a traditional Imeretian dish that they also call “ekala”.
Mariam and her mother first boiled the ekala (Smilaxes can be eaten raw in smaller quantities, but cooked is more popular. I assume it’s more forgiving to the digestive system that way.) Then they enhanced the cooked ekala with classic Georgian flavors and textures: milled walnuts, garlic, dill, jalapeno, grape vinegar, and the airy tops and flowers of coriander (cilantro). See the recipe here. They served the final dish at room temp, as is customary. The ekala itself was tender and vegetal, definitely adjacent to asparagus. I began to understand why ekala - and smilaxes as a whole - top the chart as some of the most palatable of wild greens.
On a broader note, ekala informs a particular distinction in Georgian cuisine. It is, loosely speaking, a type of salad. Americans have their own ideas of what constitutes a “salad”. Usually that means crisp lettuce, roughly chopped veggies, and a liquidy dressing of some sort. In Georgian homes you experience many lettuce-less salads, many of them served at room temp. Some are raw, like the ubiquitous chopped tomato and cucumber salad. Others, like the ekala described above, highlight a singular vegetable or leafy green that has been boiled and combined with a variety of raw aromatics. There is always a foundational ingredient(s) in these types of salads. It could be your garden variety cabbage, spinach, beetroot, etc. Or it could be a wild vegetable like bear’s garlic (ramps), dandelion, purslane, nettle, wild asparagus, etc. The featured ingredient is usually supplemented with conventional herbs, garlic/onion, milled walnuts, and oil or vinegar. If these elements are processed very finely and pounded together, becoming paste-like, then that is called pkhali - a yummy spreadable veggie dip of sorts. The ekala I made with Mariam and her mother could be considered ekala pkhali I suppose, but it had more of a salad structure to me. Semantics aside, I enjoyed broadening my perspective on how to feature herbs and vegetables, especially wild ones.
The Georgian way of approaching wild and cultivated veggies/herbs is very similar to the Greeks. In Greek cuisine there are crunchy chopped salads, spreadable salads, and salads of boiled greens (hortas). I have a great book which describes these concepts much better than I have here. It is called Ikaria: Lessons on Food, Life, and Longevity from the Greek Island Where People Forget to Die by Diane Kochilas. It’s worth the read, and you’ll see many similarities between Greek and Georgian flora and recipes.
My host Mariam also showed me how she preserves smilax for winter. She goes the pickling/canning route. If you’re a canner, then you know the general steps and rules. Sterilize, blanch, pack, brine, lid, water bath, etc. What I found curious about her method, however, was that she didn’t use salt but aspirin! 1 aspirin per every kilo. Apparently, it is no longer advised to use aspirin as a food preservative here in the states. It’s an old school technique, but I’m not gonna knock it. If a Georgian or Greek person tells me what to eat and how to process it, I’m not gonna argue. I’ll probably be enjoying ekala every summer for the rest of my life thanks to all that I learned in Georgia. And I hope this inspires someone else to embrace the briers in their lives.
|| Wander here for more Caucasus x Appalachia series information ||
SOURCES & FURTHER READING:
https://www.gbif.org/species/144106726
https://tennessee-kentucky.plantatlas.usf.edu/Genus.aspx?id=968
https://www.eattheweeds.com/smilax-a-brier-and-thats-no-bull/