Spruce tips ✦

Pousses d'épicéa

What it is

Only the new growth is edible — the pale soft candles that push out of a papery brown sheath — and the window between bud break and the needles hardening runs two or three weeks. Sailors on northern voyages brewed those shoots into spruce beer against scurvy, on the strength of a vitamin C content nobody could yet measure.

In the kitchen

Layer them raw with their own weight of sugar in a jar and leave it three weeks in the dark: the syrup that draws out keeps a year, where the tips themselves brown in days. Check what you are picking — yew has no papery sheath and is lethal.

Goes with

Trout Salmon Cream Honey White sugar Juniper berry Salt

In season alongside

Buckler-leaf sorrel Douglas fir tips Grapefruit Oxalis

Something wrong here, or missing? Tell us