Garlic mustard photo from the Minnesota DNR.

By Evelyn Ashford
My teenage son is to pesto what a humvee is to gasoline -- a seemingly bottomless receptacle. So last spring, when I received a postcard from the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden inviting me to pull, take home, and cook with wild garlic mustard -- including a recipe for pesto -- I didn’t hesitate. Free food! In addition, they were offering garlic mustard to partner restaurants Lucia’s in Minneapolis and Heartland in St. Paul, which would feature the herb on their menus.

The park board is hosting three garlic mustard “pulls” at the wildflower garden again this spring, on May 5, 13, and 21; for more information and to register to join the fun, go here. In addition, Friends of the Mississippi River will hold garlic mustard weeding events on April 25 (Inver Grove Heights) and 30 (Minneapolis River Gorge), and May 6 (Crosby Farm in St. Paul); preregistration is required, so please visit them on the Web for more information.

Wild garlic mustard is an invasive species introduced to the United States in the 1800s as a pot herb. It is a delicious addition to many recipes, if picked in the spring before it flowers (April and May in Minnesota). By early summer, the plant tastes bitter, and by August, it’s inedible. Garlic mustard escaped from 19th-century gardens and now thrives in the wild, where it out-competes native plants. In its home range in Europe, the herb has more than 70 insect and fungal enemies, but here in North America, it has none. Plus, this pungent herb is allelopathic -- it prevents the seeds of other plants from germinating, and so can overwhelm a healthy ecosystem in just a few years. Bitter, indeed.

The garlic mustard program at the Eloise Butler garden is the brainchild of garden curator Susan Wilkins, who first came up with the idea when she observed people in other public parks harvesting and eating it -- an illegal activity, as is removing any plant material from any city park. However, seeing people harvesting the plant sparked her curiosity, and she thought she’d try to get those folks involved in park restoration. She also knew of garlic mustard festivals in the East, and thought she could summon some of that enthusiasm here in the Twin Cities. By all measures, the effort has been a success so far, and Wilkins is offering it again this year.

On the May evening when I arrived at Eloise Butler to participate in a garlic mustard “pull,” a friendly volunteer coordinator met me at the gate and led me up a back trail to the garlic mustard pulling area. I was greeted by heady and delicate but undeniably garlicky scents as I neared the busy hive of volunteers on the slope below. Dove-colored sunlight slanted through the tree canopy, which was still mostly bare twigs with occasional chartreuse flowers. Wilkins, with waist-length auburn braids and a broad smile, showed me how to pull the invasive weed.

Garlic mustard was not hard to identify once I learned to spot its basal rosette of leaves, and not hard to pull, with a quick twist and yank. It’s a biennial that flowers only in its second year, and the plants on the slope were mostly first year, so they hadn’t had a chance to spread by seed.

Volunteers -- ranging in age from 6 to 70 -- chatted cheerfully, exchanging recipe ideas as they squatted over the tessellation of last fall’s oak leaves. Wilkins says the garlic mustard pulls are drawing people in their 20s and 30s, younger than the average 50-something volunteer, giving her hope that a new generation is becoming involved in park restoration.

I drove home with my bag full of greens, satisfied with having helped the garden, and set to making my pesto. I took Wilkins’s recommendations: add basil to the greens, and substitute cashews for the pine nuts to cut some of the bitterness. The basil covered much of the distinct flavor of the garlic mustard, a disappointment -- to me. My son didn’t mind, though, and he ate his way through bowl after pasta-tossed bowl.

Later, in the name of research, I decided to visit Lucia’s restaurant. Garlic mustard was on the menu in the form of a compound butter, served with wild rice and zucchini pancakes. The garlic mustard lent a subtle nutty, woodsy flavor to the butter, which was heavenly with the delicate, creamy pancakes. Sage-laced white beans, flavorful baby greens and roasted vegetables completed the entrée.

Our other entrée did not come with garlic mustard, but the waiter offered to bring an extra portion of it anyway. To me, the meal was idyllic and the garlic mustard sublime. My dining companion, whose taste sometimes runs to cold Progresso soup straight from the can, liked it pretty well, too.

Lucia’s restaurant owner and chef Lucia Watson regularly features local and wild foods on her menu -- a forager brings her wild greens and mushrooms. “He shows up at the back door when he finds stuff,” she told me later, with an enigmatic grin. So when Wilkins approached Watson about using wild garlic mustard, the chef was enthusiastic. “It was such a win-win situation, eat your enemy and all that,” she said.

As for cooking with garlic mustard, Watson advised, “You can do anything with it. Sauté it, throw it in a stir-fry, puree it in a soup, or make compound butters.” And, of course, pesto. Watson uses parsley instead of basil in her garlic mustard pesto, which she said allows more of the weed’s flavor to come through.

And there’s plenty of weed to go around. Garlic mustard is a problem throughout Minnesota (and the U.S.), and the best way to control the pest, says Wilkins, is to prevent it from becoming established. My son and I will be happy to do our part by eating as much garlic mustard pesto as we can next spring.

This article first ran in the summer 2008 edition of MOQ.