Food before traveling: Nettles

I'm writing this from Philadelphia, where we're temporarily parked before heading up to NY for thanksgiving and the return trip to Florence.  We'll be gone for 10 days all told, so we did a good job cleaning out the fridge of all perishables in the meals preceding our departure.  We were so successful at it, in fact, that there was essentially nothing left to eat for our last day in town.  Which is why I found myself gathering nettles in the hills south of Florence last Tuesday.
Now, I associate nettle greens with spring.  I love spring, but as a season it taunts you -- after being starved of fresh green vegetables whose names don't begin with kale all winter long the world is suddenly full of green growing things, but the green growing things in your garden are probably 10 weeks from being ready to pick.  Where I was growing up fresh new nettles were one of the first green plants that were ready to eat early in the year.  So I was rather surprised to see them poking through the unseasonable snow last fall when we first got to Italy. 

I'd noticed that the new nettles were coming in a couple of days earlier, and cursed myself for not having a bag to pick them into, so I brought along an extra bag.  Rubber gloves or work gloves will make picking nettles without getting stung easier, but there's a trick to picking them with your bare hands which made us all very proud when we were ten or so:  all of the little spiny hairs point up, towards the top of the stem and the tip of the leaf, so if you pluck off the tips with an upward motion you shouldn't get stung much.  Takes a bit of practice, but I was pleased to discover that I haven't lost the knack in the last 15 years or so.  For cooking with you really only want the tops of the younger plants, which are more tender, but if tea is what you're after old dried ones will work just fine.  I made a fair bit of my summer spending money picking wild nettles by the gunnysack full and I can't say it's something I enjoyed much, but if you like nettle tea the open season is much longer than the eating season. 

Nettles have a rather delicate minerally bright green kind of flavor (really, really what you want after not quite enough fresh food during the winter) which can be a bit of a trick to keep central if you're doing anything more complicated than steaming them lightly and serving with a bit of butter.  Which, by the way, can be excellent.  They also cook down a lot and can be overcooked fairly easily.  You really only need to heat them up just enough for the spines to break down, which isn't much.

This time around I knew I wanted to make them in a cream sauce (because we had a bit of milk that needed to be used) on fresh pasta (because we had flour and not much else).  I also wanted to increase the savory element of the dish without sacrificing the delicacy and freshness of the nettles.

I started out by crushing a clove of garlic and a dozen black and sichuan pepper corns to accentuate the pepperyness of the nettles and sauteed them in butter until the garlic turned a light golden brown.  I then removed them, made a rue, then a cream sauce and tossed in the pile of chopped nettle greens.  While all this is going the pasta needs to be cooked -- it should go in about the same time as the nettles and only cook for a min. or so (for fresh pasta) before being drained and mixed in with the sauce to cook for another minute to integrate the flavors.  Serve it with a bit of freshly ground pepper and some sea salt.  Our other course was a salad consisting of chicory the nettles had been growing next to and the last bit of arugula from our garden.  We didn't have any around, but I would have this with a fresh, young minerally white.

Also, while I don't think this preparation is especially traditional anywhere, this really can be seen as cucina della povera:  The whole meal, while admittedly light, cost less than a euro and probably quite a bit less and was based around ingredients that are free in season to anyone who wants to pick them.