However you spell it, wild food like poke salit tastes good. Next to wild asparagus and wild dandelion buds it's my favorite Spring vegetable. Probably it dropped a rank this year because we picked so much of this wild edible herb that I learned a way to cook it poorly, which has inspired me to write this article. Next year I'll read this and do it right.

A word about foraging safety: never eat a wild plant you don't know. Poke salad, properly harvested and cooked, is a perfectly safe and delicious wilderness food. Choose new sprouts less than a foot and a half high and discard any portions of the stem that are tough. At that height, most of the plant is usable. As poke matures it becomes toxic, but this is well within the safety margin. Never eat the root -- that is very dangerous and often fatal. Not that you will be anywhere near the root, as pokeweed is rooted very deeply and none of the plant that's below ground is anything you want anyway. Follow the rules and for two or three weeks in late Spring you'll have regular servings of succulent poke salit. Plants can be harvested two or three times in one season. Polk salad and other wild edibles have been a welcome source of free groceries for us this Spring.

Poke's thick tender stems have the texture of asparagus while the succulent leaves cook down like spinach. Most people recommend boiling poke in three waters, meaning that you boil it a few minutes, drain off the water, boil it in fresh water, drain it, boil it in fresh water and serve it. To me that's a little overdone and I can't think that any vegetable treated that way would retain many vitamins. Some of my older Ozark neighbors liked it boiled once and drained, but poke has an acrid flavor that goes away with two waters, and that's the way I like it.

Wash the poke thoroughly and slice the stems and leaves into two or three inch pieces. Fill a pot half full with the herb and then add as much water as the pot will safely hold. Toss in a teaspoon of salt and bring the pot to a boil. Reduce the heat and boil for five minutes.

Drain the first water and add fresh water to the pot. Again add a teaspoon of salt and bring the poke to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer at least five more minutes, or until the thicker stems are tender. Remove from heat and drain.

In the pan, add a tablespoon of butter. Add salt if needed. Poke salad doesn't need extra seasoning. It's a mild but distinctive vegetable with a hint of acridity if properly cooked. Experiment with other seasonings if you like, but poke is able to stand alone.

This year we had an abundance of poke salad to harvest and although we ate all we picked, I overestimated how much I could cook properly in one pot. If you fill the pot full with this vegetable and then add water, you may have to boil it four times to tone down the acridity. After two waters it was a little stout for me, but still good.