Purslane

Portulaca oleracea

Appears in

Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini

By Elizabeth Schneider

Published 2001

About

Also pussley, pursley, verdolagas (Latin American)

I learned . . . that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner off a dish of purslane (Portulaca oleracea) which I gathered in my corn field”, wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden (1854), “yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries.”

What would Thoreau make of a dish of purslane that fetches fifteen dollars on a present-day menu? Once frugal fare, wild foods are now stars in sumptuous dining rooms. “Necessaries” have become luxuries. The odd turnaround has reintroduced foods lost to the tempo of the times. Purslane is now being gathered and cultivated in North America after roughly a century of neglect, thanks in large part to haute cuisine.