Eating yucca fruit

Bradford Angier (who turns out to be a plagiarist), Steve Brill, Euell Gibbon—all silent on the subject of yucca fruit. I found a few web references but precious little information on how to prepare the pods, aside from boiling them up in a desert stew or roasting them in ashes. 

But Billie Joe Tatum's Wild Foods Field Guide and Cookbook recommends candying the flowers and boiling the seeds, once removed from the pods. Sounds fiddly, but promising.

The flowers above are Yucca filamentosa, growing at the Pier 44 garden, Red Hook. Before I knew you could eat the flowers or fruit.

I nibbled on a blossom in the Rockaways recently, off a sandy path between beach plum and bayberries on the way to the sea. It tasted fine. Vegetal, pleasant, soft. Then I potted the pods on another plant and pounced. Yee ha! The happiness of the forager.

Later I found more at Dead Horse Bay.

Now I had yucca. Sliced across, they are pretty in a tripartite way. I decided to peel the green skin off.

The white part inside, destined to become seeds, was very slightly mucilaginous, and had a hint of bitterness. Like green bean crossed with a bitterish cucumber. It had potential. But I ran out of steam. It's hard work peeling these peanut-sized pods, and I had other things on other burners. Milkweed pods on one, dolmades on another. And it was hot.

Fortunately I had a solution: when in doubt, pickle. 

So there they are. Pickled. Take that, you, you yucca, you... 

For good measure I added a teaspoon of bayberry fruit to the mix. We'll investigate in about three weeks?