I’m really surprised that I’ve never heard of dandelion wine here in Germany, because where I live, half of the country is covered in yellow in early summer with dandelions, and maybe you could make more wine of it than our local breweries make beer. Nonetheless, nobody does anything with it.
ETA: I just remembered that the other day my father, who was born in 1935, told me about the habits of French POWs who worked (were slaved) on the farms of our region in WWII. They used to gather dandelion leafs and snails to eat them. The local people thought they were crazy.
People have done lots of things with dandelions. The most curious thing for me was when in WWII the Sowjets and the Germans used it for making rubber, as the primary sources were not available. Here is a link in German. The sap is milky and can be processed through vulcanisation just like normal rubber.
Salad is also an alternative, the French your father mentioned were right. Today you can buy dandelion leaves in France and in Belgium at grocery stores. They are much bigger than what grows in the fields, up to one meter. A bit bitter, but so is rocket salad. And reading for this answer I discovered that radicchio is a variety of dandelion, not of common salad, as I thought.
Concerning snails and eating them: I remember from my childhood that you can can catch snails in the fields (is catching the right word? They are not exactly speeding away) but you should not eat them right away. Because you don’t know what they have eaten: some plants are poisonous for humans but nor for snails. So you leave them in a net for days or weeks, occasionally wetting them a little. When they empty their guts via the anal orifices you can cook them safely after rinsing them in cold water.
Never. But I might try it next spring, now that I know about it. If I don’t forget until then, which, knowing me… If I do, I will report.
ETA: My wife is going to look at me like I am crazy. Again… I like it.
ETA II: Though the right person to ask for obscure recipes is @pulykamell Perhaps he knows more about dandelion wine?
I used to live in a second floor apartment that looked out over a tavern straight onto the approach path to SeaTac. I could just about look in the windows and identify the passengers. If there was a conversation taking place in my apartment, it was between planes. Have not lived there for decades, but now I see how glad I am I moved, because the light rail runs less than 200’ from my old front door.
Yeah, @silenus got here before me. I’ve never made dandelion wine myself, but my uncle did when I was a kid. Being a kid, I never tried it. The basic idea is you use sugar as your fermentable and use dandelion heads for flavor, smell, and color, but it’s also typically buttressed with some citrus (orange and lemons) and raisins (for additional body, yeast nutrient, even more fermentables, and flavor, of course.) Just sugar and dandelions would yield something way too thin, I would think.
Not nearly so bad for me since when they go over they’re still at somewhere around 10,000 feet (they continue north past Seattle, turn east and then south into final). Since I grew up under the flight path to what was then McChord Field, I generally don’t hear them except as background noise — unless they start decelerating, which sounds something like a banshee.
I was misremembering the BBC comedy The Good Life (a.k.a. Good Neighbors) thinking their homemade wine was dandelion- it was actually “peapod burgundy”. Famous for being popskull enough to hurt the back of your eyes.
Radicchio is a cultivated variety of chicory (Chichorium intybus), not dandelion (Taraxacum officianale). They are both members of the vast Compositae family, as are lettuce, sunflowers, asters, daisies.
