Stinging Nettle--Famine food and spring tonic

by Louise Bergen Price

I don't like gardening in gloves, but several times a years I pull them on and prepare to tackle the stinging nettles that thrive in the forest loam soil of our garden. Always, I remember my great-grandparents, banished to Siberia, who likely supplemented their starvation rations with nettles; my frustration as I tug out the long runners is tinged with gratitude.

Stinging nettle has been used as famine food in many areas of the world, from the Great Potato Famine in Ireland, 1845/49, to famines in Scandinavia, Ethiopia, and North India. Chronicler Gerhard Trunkhan writes about a famine in Musikantendorf Hundeshagen in 1772/73 when over one hundred died in the village. There was no grain; sometimes two, three or four weeks went by without a mouthful of bread or anything to cook. "Gras und Brennessel musste man essen wie das Vieh. Gott behüte jeden Menschen für solch eine Zeit." (We had to eat grass and stinging nettles like cattle. May God save each one from experiencing such a time.)⁽²⁾ In another famine in Germany in 1816, the poor mixed stinging nettles with bran to make bread.⁽³⁾

After the second world war, Mennonite refugees living in Germany learned to eat nettles steamed with butter. After a winter of root vegetables, nettles provided variety and nourishment. One of these refugees, Helen Pauls' friend Henry, continues to use stinging nettles. "I dry them each year and crumble the flakes into my Yerba Mate tea. It cuts the bitterness and gives the tea a better flavour."

Here in BC, people of the Shuswap nation ate cooked nettles as greens; so did early pioneers. Rolf Knight writes: "Each spring Phyllis picked and put up batches of stinging nettle tops as a kind of spinach. They have to be gathered when they are young and tender. You blanch them, cook them with bits of bacon and preserve thirty sealers full to eat with potatoes."⁽⁴⁾

With the recent boom in the health food industry, nettles, which are high in calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc, and vitamins B and A, are again becoming popular. Seed catalogues sell nettle roots, so folks can grow their own nettle patches. Health food stores sell nettles in the form of dried leaves, pills and tinctures to cure a lengthy list of ailments including gout, arthritis, hair loss and goitre. Flogging with nettles is said to cure arthritis and chronic rheumatism. Nettle tea is a spring time tonic. Pick the nettles while under 8 inches, cover with boiling water, steep, and serve. Some may prefer to take their tonic in the form of Stinging Nettle Schnapps! ⁽⁵⁾