While harvesting this years crop of peppers, I wondered if Habanero leaves (Capsicum chinense) would be good in a salad. So I tasted one, and found it to have a pleasant flavor, somewhat like mustard greens. The trouble is that peppers, like potatoes, tomatoes, and deadly nightshade, are members of the Solanaceae family, which is is well known for producing poisonous alkaloids. Eating a few dozen of them might have serious consequences. Googling on habaneros reveals that groundhogs, or some small furry mammal, find the leaves to be tasty, but nothing on whether humans can eat them. I also came up empty at several recipe sites. Does anyone, (perhaps Mangetout ?) know anything about the edibility of these leaves ?
When potatoes, leaves, or haulms are green,
To livestock must they ne’er be gi’en
(ancient anon, re. solanine poisoning.)
Hmmm, I’ve never tried eating them; I’d be just as wary as you for exactly the same reasons, however, Google did turn up a couple of results for “capsicum leaves”, one of which describes them as an ingredient known as Peperblad in several languages, another link has a brief description of a :
My advice would be to see if you can track down a copy of the book, just in case there are any qualifiers to their edibility.
I’ll keep looking and post again if I find anything else; I have a number of edible plant books at home.
I’ve found a claim that the ensalada pepper has edible leaves, and also a few sites that claim that “the tips” of pepper leaves are edible. The later claim makes me wonder about the rest of the leaf. However, it turns out that the local university has a copy of “Edible Leaves of the Tropics”, so I should know more this afternoon.
-Thanks
I’ve steamed a few leaves from Habanero, and Cayenne plants, and found them quite tasty. If I’ still alive in a few days, I shall move on to “Chicken breasts in lime butter, served on a bed of habanero leaves.” The wiser course of action is probably to hold off on using the raw leaves as salad greens until I get a better feel for how the cooked ones behave.
ELotT has this on potato leaves:
So if you happen to feel like dining on the edge some evening…
I would certainly hope that solanine poisoning is not cumulative in the way you imply, since this government sponsored report tells us that the average american eats 12.75 mg solanine and other potato glycoalkaloids per day. Brits and germans probably consume similar amounts. Apparently there’s been no research on long term human toxicity (see report); but as a glyco-steroid, solanine probably accumulates to some extent in the liver. Lots of them do. That means that if you eat too much over too long a time period, the concentration will build and you can get chronic poisoning. However, if you decrease your daily intake, the solanine will gradually be flushed from the body like most other substances. Otherwise we’d have all died from potato poisoning years ago.
Here’s a link with less detail than the govt. report. Paging forward and back provides a nice overview of solanine in food crops.
It’s encouraging to see that Squink is still alive after all these years of eating pepper leaves.
Related question: I commonly see ornamental Capsicum varieties advertised as being edible although almost all of them are reported to be extremely hot. Are there any on the market that are actually toxic?*
*note that another species, Solanum pseudocapsicum (Jerusalem cherry) which is sometimes sold as an ornamental around Xmas time is said to be quite toxic (berries or leaves).
I’ve eaten the “black pearls”, and the little cayenne looking ones; can’t tell which cultivar. None were either hot enough or toxic enough to kill. The Iranian woman down the street harvests them each fall for food use when they dig them out of the local ornamental gardens. I collect coleus and banana roots (for overwintering) myself.
