Burgundy is famous for its wines, fondue and… snails. An invitation to discover this plant-rich country at the pace of gastropods, but on your own two feet. Here are a few of them to discover along Burgundy’s paths.

Composites by the roadside

On our journey, we won’t come across the most elegant of plants.Mugwort, for example, doesn’t really look like much. When young, it forms large green clumps that turn gray with age. Its deeply divided leaves show a striking contrast between their dark-green upper surface and their whitish-cottony underside. Tiny, yellowish-green flowers stretch in loose clusters from the tips of the branches. Their charm lies not in their appearance, but in the sweet incense scent they give off when crumpled.

Young mugwort shoots are picked with the tender tips of the stems, which are juicy, aromatic and sweet. Their flavor is reminiscent of artichokes, and they make excellent fritters. In Japan, young leaves are boiled and eaten with toasted sesame seeds and soy sauce. They are also used to flavor and color glutinous rice dumplings called mochi. To make them available year-round, the leaves are blanched in boiling water, then dried in the shade and finally in the sun. The inflorescences, which appear at the end of summer, are a remarkable addition to creams and custards.

Opinions differ. For some, mugwort was dedicated to Artemis, goddess of wild beasts and protector of women and virgins; for others, to Artemisia, Queen of Caria and widow of Mausoleus, for whom she built the famous funerary monument. Both were experts in the virtues of plants, and specialized in gynecology. In fact, mugwort is supreme in this field. It regulates the onset of menstruation and reduces the pain that often accompanies it. It also has a positive effect on the liver and digestive system. In acupuncture, small mugwort cones ( moxas) are burned to stimulate energy points.

The Artemisia genus is vast, with 350 species worldwide, including 55 in Europe. In addition to wormwood, these include wormwood, genepis and tarragon. Annual mugwort, originally from the Far East, offers great promise in the treatment of malaria.

Tansy combines a divine aroma with intense bitterness. If you know how to use it wisely, it’s a remarkable condiment. Traditionally, the leaves are used to flavour liqueurs. In this spirit, our plant is often called “arquebuse” or “chartreuse”. It enhances the flavor of infusions of mint or other fragrant plants. To reduce bitterness, it’s best to macerate a few leaf fragments cold: with a little lemon and honey, you can make refreshing drinks. The most interesting results are obtained by combining tansy with other aromatic herbs.^[1] then working the mixture by decoction, infusion and addition of fresh plant to milk or water to flavor creams, custards, mousses, sorbets or other desserts. Tansy acts as a sort of flavor enhancer. Culinary alchemy: it must be added to other plants in such proportions that you don’t really smell it, but something is missing if it’s not there… The flower heads can be used in the same way as the leaves, but they’re even stronger!

Tansy was widely used in Elizabethan England in the ^16th century. It was appreciated for its pronounced flavor and somewhat medicinal odor… The juice extracted from it was the perfect flavoring for sweet omelettes known as tansies. But its vogue has faded.

Tansy tones the body, helps menstruation and eliminates intestinal worms. It should be avoided during pregnancy, as it has been used, not without risk, as an abortifacient, due to its thujone content. In high doses, tansy is dangerous. In fact, the use of essential oil distilled from the plant as a vermifuge has led to poisoning. A bouquet of fresh tansy placed in a room tends, by its scent, to keep insects away. Good to know for gardeners: the plant can be used as an insecticide in the same way as its cousin pyrethrum.^[2].

“Chartreuse – – Pick a handful of young tansy leaves before they flower. – Macerate in a liter of fruit alcohol with 60 g of sugar. – After a month, remove the tansy and filter the liquid. – To give the liqueur a beautiful green color, proceed as follows: finely chop nettle leaves, place them on a cloth and moisten with water. – Leave to stand for 10 minutes, then twist the cloth to extract as much juice as possible – Heat the juice in a bain-marie at less than 70°C. The chlorophyll coagulates: extract it with a spoon and pour into the “Chartreuse”. – The resulting chlorophyll can be stored for some time in the refrigerator.

Much more modest than its cousins, chamomile matricaria requires you to lean over it to see it up close. It’s easy to spot, though, because where it grows, nothing else comes along except tall plantain and creeping bird’s-foot weed. Indeed, these humble plants have adapted to soil compacted by the passage of feet, paws and wheels: they grow not at the edge but right in the middle of paths, in the compacted clay of country roads or farmyards, or even on city esplanades if the road services have been stingy with herbicides.

Matricaria is a small annual plant with a single, stiff stem that is difficult to cut between the fingers, as if the plant preferred to be pulled rather than cut. Its finely cut foliage is reminiscent of light moss. Its curious greenish-yellow conical flower heads seem incomplete, lacking ligules, like a daisy reduced to a conical “heart”. Then, once again, the magic happens: when these insignificant balls are resolutely crumpled, a delicious pineapple-like fragrance is unexpectedly released. In fact, Americans call our plant pineapple weed, and botanists call it Chamomilla suaveolens, sweet-smelling chamomile.

Matricaria flower heads are a welcome addition to salads, where they explode in the mouth. In addition to their aroma, they have the interesting property of provoking dense salivation. This trigeminal effect^[3] can also be found in tarragon or mafane brède^[4]. As a result, matricaria acts as a flavor enhancer, prolonging the “mouthfeel” of dishes. Suitably prepared, matricaria flower heads are a remarkable flavoring in sauces, drinks or desserts.

Let’s pause for a moment to consider the term chamomile. Its origins lie in the Greek chamaï, “dwarf”, and mêlon, “apple-like fruit”. The globular appearance of the flower heads and their scent may indeed recall this fruit, hence the plant’s Spanish name, manzanilla, from manzana, “apple”.

But there are actually several types of chamomile, all cousins and members of the large Compositae family. They include German chamomile, Roman chamomile, scentless chamomile, feverfew, stinking chamomile and false chamomile. Unlike matricaria, they have ligulate flowers, i.e. what appear to be “petals” on the periphery of the flower head. German chamomile has a pleasant, fairly mild scent; Roman chamomile, a remedy for difficult digestion, is stronger but pleasant; feverfew is less delicate – but is a sovereign against migraines. All other species are odorless or unpleasant. The flower heads of fragrant species can be used in the same way as those of matricaria, but their fragrance is not as sweet.

When distilled, chamomile yields an essential oil with an attractive blue color due to a special substance called azulene. Their flower heads tone the body, aid digestion, relax the nervous system and soothe aches and pains.

Sweet clover is supremely aromatic in creams, sorbets, sauces and drinks. A stronger, wilder condiment than woodruff, it nonetheless adds roundness to dishes. Fresh tagliatelle with sweet clover is a simple yet deeply moving dish. The seeds were once used as a spice, in particular to flavor cheeses.

The plant has calming and blood-thinning properties. But excessive doses can be emetic and cause a variety of disorders. Moreover, if sweet clover becomes moldy, coumarin is transformed into dicoumarol, a toxic substance used to kill rats and mice by internal hemorrhaging.

Tagliatelle with sweet clover – To make the fresh pasta, form a 300g flour fountain on a smooth work surface and break 3 eggs in the center. – Add a pinch of salt and a little olive oil. Mix until you obtain a firm but malleable dough. – Form into a ball and cover with a cloth. Leave to rest for 1 hour or so. Roll out thin sheets 2-3 mm thick on a lightly floured surface and cut into long ribbons. – Pour vegetable stock into a saucepan, add dried sweet clover and liquid cream. – Reduce by half over low heat. – Season and strain. Keep the sauce warm and cook the tagliatelle for 2 minutes in boiling salted water. – Drain and mix gently with the sauce. – This recipe was created by Joël Quentin of theEurotel in Villars-sur-Ollon.

Alfalfa leaves are not to be sneezed at. Their pleasant, distinctive flavor can be enjoyed raw in salads or as a cooked vegetable. Among the Kabyles of Morocco, alfalfa accompanies couscous made with cornmeal. Their richness in complete proteins, chlorophyll, provitamin A and vitamin K is impressive. The latter is commercially extracted from alfalfa.

The inflorescences are also edible and decorate salads beautifully. The seeds are germinated and the young shoots that develop are eaten raw after a few days. They are a very healthy food with a delicate flavor, and their popularity is growing all the time. They are commonly sold, under the Arabic namealfalfa, in health food stores and some supermarkets. To harvest the seeds yourself, you can beat the ripe inflorescences on a sheet placed on the ground, then winnow the result.

The vaporous foliage of vetch elegantly lines paths. Their slender, highly branched stems are covered with leaves cut into narrow leaflets, the terminals transformed into tendrils. Together, they form light green clusters that are colored by small, purplish flowers. The papilionaceous corolla of these flowers indicates that the plant belongs to the Leguminosae family. The fruits are narrow, horn-shaped pods. Black when ripe, they open spontaneously and release small, spherical, brownish-green seeds.

Some forty different species, often difficult to distinguish, grow in France, from the seashore to the summits. They can be divided into two main groups: vetches with solitary flowers, or flowers in pairs in the leaf axils, and vetches with flowers in more or less elongated clusters. All can be used in the same way, but some are rare.

Young vetch shoots can be eaten as a vegetable. The seeds of several species were once eaten after long cooking. Some of these plants were even cultivated for this purpose. But the seeds of some vetches contain hydrocyanic acid. Simply boil them for a long time in water, then discard the water, to eliminate this potential hazard.

Umbelliferae aromas

Frozen yoghurt with wild carrot fruit – Roughly chop the carrot umbels into fruit and arrange in three equal heaps. – Boil 1 l water with 300 g sugar and add the first heap. – After a quarter of an hour, remove from the heat and add the second heap. Cover. – A quarter of an hour later, when the liquid has become lukewarm, add the third heap and blend for a long time with an immersion blender. – Filter carefully through a fine sieve. – Add 1⁄4 l crème fleurette and 8 plain yoghurts to the liquid. – Process in an ice-cream maker.

For a long time, parsnips were confused with carrots under the same name of pastinaca. Emperor Tiberius was so fond of them that he regularly sent for them from the farthest reaches of the Empire. Ronsard also loved them:

“ Artichoke and salad,

Asparagus and pastenade^[5]

And the pompoms^[6] tourangeaux

I’m more fond of herbs

Let the royal meats

Who serve themselves in heaps. “

After great success as a root vegetable, parsnip fell into oblivion barely a century ago. While the English still sell parsnip roots in their markets, in France the plant is little more than a common “grassy weed” that grows abundantly on the side of the road. As such, it is often confused with hogweed, its cousin in the Umbelliferae family. Its densely tufted leaves are made up of five to eleven opposite, oval, lobed segments, while hogweed’s are twice divided into broad, angular segments.

Like carrots, parsnips are biennial plants. The root is harvested between the end of the first year of its life, when it has gorged itself on sugars, and the beginning of the second: at this point, the flowering stem sprouts and the root becomes woody. In their prime, wild parsnip roots, brown on the outside and white on the inside, are tender and fleshy. They’re good raw, chopped in salads, but it’s customary to cook them. Their texture is less firm than that of carrots, and their flavor more aromatic. They are used in purées and gratins, soups and stews.

Parsnip leaves are edible raw or cooked. They are best eaten young. However, when fresh, they can cause skin irritation in sensitive people whose bare skin they touch and who then expose themselves to the sun. One subspecies, the stinging parsnip, has been particularly incriminated. Contact dermatitis can lead to second-degree burns.

In the spring of the second year of its life, parsnip develops a rigid, furrowed stem, crowned at the top with multiple umbels of greenish-yellow flowers. Soon, small, oval, flattened, winged fruits appear, which are highly aromatic when crushed between the fingers. Rich in essential oil, they form a powerful condiment similar to hogweed. They can be used in the same way as ginger. They stimulate the body and aid digestion.

And many other families…

Suddenly, the summer air is fragrant. A delicious honey-like fragrance caresses the nostrils: true bedstraw is in bloom. The edge of the path, dry and chalky, is decorated with a vaporous border of stems densely covered with bluish-green leaves, very fine, in tiered whorls. These whorls are characteristic of currants, but can also be found on woodruff and cottongrass. Tiny flowers curl up in yellow clusters at the top of the stems. You have to get up close to make out the four sharp, golden-yellow, fused petals.

• It’s called “curd” because it was used in cheese-making. In practice, it seems that the best vegetable rennet comes from thistle flowers, still used until recently in western France. However, the flowers of the true bedstraw can be used to make delicious honey-tasting sorbets.

Most of our forty or so species of bedstraw have white, odorless flowers and no culinary uses.

It’s at the time of year when the earth is closest to daylight that the roadsides are adorned with the golden bouquets of St. John’s wort. In many regions, it’s known as “St. John’s wort”, because the apostle’s feast day falls on June 24, shortly after the summer solstice. Others prefer to call it “thousand-hole grass”, because of the many light spots that can be seen by holding one of its leaves against the light. This is also the meaning of “St. John’s wort”.^[7] “. These are in fact small, translucent glands, filled with a fragrant essence: crumpling a leaf between your fingers reveals a fruity scent reminiscent of peaches.

Its upright, highly branched stems have the distinctive feature of being crossed lengthwise by two protruding lines that are easy to detect with the fingers. The rounded, opposite leaves are edged with small black dots. The flowers, grouped at the top of the stems, unfurl five large sun-colored petals all summer long, delicately punctuated with black at the edges. When the flowers are squeezed hard, a few drops of a crimson liquid emerge, intensely staining the fingers. This deep color is transferred to the famous “St. John’s wort oil”, prepared by macerating the flowering tops for three weeks. An excellent remedy for sunburn, St. John’s wort oil can also be used as a vulnerary on wounds and ulcers. Local massage often alleviates or eliminates ill-defined pain. The doctrine of signatures, which establishes correspondences between plants and ailments, sees a dual expression of the plant’s healing power in the color of its flowers, bright yellow like a burning sun, and in the red of their juice, which evokes skin burnt by its rays.

Sales of St. John’s Wort have soared in recent years, following the recognition of its antidepressant virtues. Americans regard it as a natural “Prozac”, and the German social security system has been reimbursing it as a mild antidepressant since 1988. Comparative studies between St. John’s Wort and allopathic drugs have proven the plant’s efficacy. However, on March^1, 2000, the French Health Products Safety Agency issued a press release warning doctors not to use St. John’s Wort for this purpose, as it would diminish the effect of other drugs taken simultaneously, such as antiretrovirals and oral contraceptives, by activating their elimination by the liver. However, it’s possible not to have AIDS, and to prefer condoms to the pill…

Certain components of St. John’s Wort can cause inflammation of sun-exposed skin if ingested by sensitive individuals. Light-coloured animals consuming large quantities of St John’s wort^[8] sometimes suffer severe second-degree burns from sunlight.

It is perhaps because of its real properties that St. John’s Wort has also been credited with magical virtues. It was the sun herb that put Satan’s legions to flight and forced witches to confess their cursed pact… Countless rituals using St John’s Wort are described for healing the possessed, exorcising houses, stables and fields. One such ritual involves picking a few branches of St John’s wort on June 24, at high noon, then passing them three times through the flames of the ritual fire lit on this night, one of the shortest of the year, while uttering an invocation to Saint John. All that remains is to hang them on the door of the house to protect it from all evil.

There are around twenty different species of St. John’s wort in our region. The most common is the perforated St. John’s wort – always the holes… Not all of them are good at making oil: squeezing the flowers between your fingers sometimes produces a clear, not purple, liquid. Hence the need, once again, for precise identification.

When we think of reseda , we think of a mysterious, exotic fragrance that few have ever smelled. Indeed, the fragrant reseda, originally from Libya, is rarely cultivated today. Several of its cousins live in France, one of which, the yellow reseda, is frequently found along roadsides.

It’s a slender, elongated perennial, ending in a tapering spike of yellowish flowers. The stems, often bent at the base and then straightened, bear small leaves divided into long segments. Wavy at the edges, dark green above, they give off a strong odor when crumpled. The flowers have a very distinctive structure. They give rise to short, swollen fruits, angular on the sides and truncated at the top.

Leaves, flowers and fruit have a pungent flavor very similar to that of mustard or watercress, members of a related family. They can be added raw to salads as a condiment.

Another reseda, gaude, was once cultivated for the yellow dye extracted from its leaves.

What are these flowers that protrude from their corolla with a bifid style resembling a snake’s tongue? Viper‘s, of course. This cousin of borage and comfrey is, like them, bristling with stiff hairs. It begins by spreading a symmetrical rosette of elongated leaves on the ground, edible at this stage. Soon, a tall, rigid stem rises up, a hairy, leafy column that pricks fingers eager to pick it. It is topped by a long cluster of purplish-blue flowers: in summer, the colorful candles of the viperine turn verges and rubble into seductive flowerbeds.

Here and there, large colonies of a plant with ample foliage line the paths. Their astonishing vitality symbolizes the power of nature: in winter, nothing is visible, then from spring onwards, the greenery grows vigorously. Real hedges quickly form, flowering in summer and bearing fruit before autumn. This is the elderberry, or “yèble”, cousin of the black and red elderberries (p. 000 and 000).

Unlike the latter, with their woody trunks, hemlock elderberry is a herbaceous plant. Its unbranched stems bear large leaves with narrow, elongated, sharp leaflets that, when crumpled, smell like toast… or perhaps burnt tires. Its flowers are pure white, more or less reddish outside, and pleasantly fragrant. Like black elderberry, they are arranged in skyward-facing corymbs. The difference is apparent at fruiting: the berries of the hemlock remain upright, whereas those of the well-known shrub fall to the ground. The berries are small, dark beads similar to black elderberries. But unlike black elderberries, they are unpleasantly bitter and are considered toxic, or at least purgative… The exact substances responsible are not known, but the seeds contain substances that have a negative effect on the heart and blood.

The flowers of the hemlock plant are used in infusions to treat flu and colds. In the past, the plant was much appreciated in rural medicine, but some applications are somewhat questionable: for viper bites, for example, crushed leaves were applied after the victim had drunk a copious decoction…

Identifying plants with certainty is only the beginning. We need to study their uses carefully and exercise a minimum of caution before putting them into practice.

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^[1] Lemon balm, mint, sweet myrrh, etc.

^[2] A large compound native to Yugoslavia and Albania, used commercially for its ability to kill insects without being toxic to warm-blooded animals.

^[3] Acting on the trigeminal nerve, the cranial nerve that innervates the face, tongue and teeth, and ensures the functioning of the masticatory muscles.

^[4] A typical Malagasy vegetable, though originally from South America.

^[5] “Pastenade” derives directly from the Latin pastinaca.

^[6] Pumpkins.

^[7] In Old French, a “pertuis” is a small opening.

^[8] As in the western United States, where St John’s wort covers hundreds of hectares.