Originally posted by qwerm:

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Edit: Cattail pollen would still have been gathered for use as a spice and the tubers would have been left alone for the next year's spice crop.

Spice? Now I wonder what they taste like...

Its tastes a lot like saffron. If you've never been able to afford saffron you can get kind of an idea by finding a flower in the very early spring called a crocus and eating unsalted roasted peanuts while smelling the crocus flowers.

You can get quite a bit of cat tail pollen from a single cat tail. If you catch the tail when its ripe but still green or just starting to turn brown you can get about a tablespoon of pollen per cat tail. When you harvest it you'll have to run it through a wire mesh sieve or a flour sifter to get rid of all the bits you don't want (like the fuzz and the bugs). Pollen season is only about a week long and the pollen doesn't keep long unless you freeze it.

To be honest most of the parts of a cat tail don't taste that good. The pollen and the youngest runners from the roots are the only parts that actually taste good. The tubers themselves are bland and boring and its hard to get the muddy flavor off of them. The green cat tails taste like something you would get from a 60's hippie health food store and the stalks would remind you of okra except slimier (boiled snot).