Let the Sun Shine In: Cattail Pollen in the Kitchen – Gardenista

Enveloped in a rustling, verdant stand of Cape Town cattails (where they are known as bulrushes), their seven-foot-long leaves moving gently above my head, I am kept company by the songs of small brown rush warblers that flit back and forth, alighting on the reeds’ flowers, heavy with pollen, which drifts down as they land. I reach up to snip off another velvety cattail flower-spike and add it to the basket at my feet. My hands are dusted with yellow pollen. It is too heavy to make me sneeze. This is how I catch sunshine, before tilting it into a jar, sealing it before it can escape, and releasing it on winter days that seem forever gray.

Cattail pollen’s warmth lights up a room and its roast-corn aroma smells like summer.

Photography by Marie Viljoen.

Cattails are species of Typha, a reedy perennial that flourishes where fresh water and land intersect gently. Shy of swift currents, they crowd the edges of ponds and lakes, stopping short of deep water, and knit themselves across seeps and wetlands. The plants are widespread, globally, occurring on almost every continent. In South Africa the native species is T. capensis. In the United States I collect the early summer flowers of common cattail (T. latifolia) and the diminutive, narrow-leafed cattail, T. angustifolia.

They are worth encouraging as a wildlife habitat (and are less dense than dominating Phragmites), and more than worth exploring as a food source—not only for sustenance, but for pleasure.

The flowers of cattails are long and skinny, with a neat division, midway: male at the top, and female below. In late spring, still sheathed in leaves, the flower is a cylinder, green and velvety. As it matures and swells, it emerges from the enclosing leaves. The top, male half gradually opens to erupt with heavy yellow pollen for a couple of weeks in early summer.

When all the pollen is shed the male flower withers and drops, leaving a naked spike. All that is left of the flowers by winter is the dry brown brushy tail, filled with seeds.

Cattails are a universal and marvelous wild food because the plants are edible, nose-to-tail. While their rhizomes yield a starchy flour (after lengthy processing) as well as juicy, mud-level buds (which require digging and careful washing), and their new leaf-shoots hide a tender heart (you may have heard of Cossack asparagus?), the easiest part of cattails to acces—and possibly the most rewarding to use, in a culinary sense—is its cheerful, flavorful pollen, which can brighten our kitchens months after summer is a memory. A bonus is that collecting the pollen does no damage to the plant or its habitat.

Cattail pollen is in season in early summer when the flowers are still young and just beginning to shed their warm yellow bounty. Raw, the silky pollen tastes like nothing. But when it is heated it is transformed, smelling and tasting richly of roasted fresh corn.