North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[David W Hausmann <wizard2468@juno.com>]

'Ello, All!
        I do know that I had a Cardinal that sat by my nightshade plants from
dawn to dusk, which was cool as Saint Louis has the Cardinal baseball
team.  [Football Cardinals left years ago, thank goodness, but that is
another story.  Basically, owner was cheap and just after money, not a
good team.]
        I did a little research on nightshade when I was in one of my
depressions, ate a few and then found out there are deadly nightshade and
purple nightshade, apparently different plants.  With the purple
nightshade, which I believe I have, it turns out the poison is strongest
in the green berries, and of course I had eaten the purple ones.  I have
also kept them around because if they stain your fingers so well, I
figure you should be able to make a dye out of them somehow.

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004 09:20:04 -0600 "Brungardt, Sam"
<Sam.Brungardt@state.mn.us> writes:
> If you're referring to Solanum nigrum when you speak of deadly
> nightshade, I assure you that there are strains of this species 
> whose
> berries are low in alkaloids and safe to eat.  My grandparents, who
> emigrated from the Volga River Valley of Russia, brought to Kansas a
> strain of nightshade that figures prominently in the traditional 
> cuisine
> of the Volga Germans.  The berries are most flavorful and palatable 
> when
> they are dead ripe.  They may be eaten raw (as any Volga German 
> child
> will attest) or they are used, when mixed with sugar and flour, as a
> topping for dumplings or Kuchen or as a filling for Maultaschen, a 
> type
> of boiled dumpling similar to vareneki or pierogi.  When the Volga
> German immigrants learned to make American-style pie, they found 
> they
> could use these Schwartzbeeren or Nachtschatten as a filling.  This
> species is not the same one as what is known in the U.S. as garden
> huckleberry; while the plants of the two species strongly resemble 
> each
> other, the berries of Schwartzbeeren are smaller, ripen throughout 
> the
> summer and fall, and do not have to be cooked with baking soda to be
> palatable. -- Sam Brungardt, St. Paul, Minn. (USDA Zone 4b)

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