Drain, arrange in a hot
dish, and pour over a carefully made cream sauce. I might add
that one stalk would furnish sufficient material for several
families. This dish should be popular in southwestern states
where the plant grows profusely; and to cultivate these plants
for shipping to Eastern markets would be quite as feasible as the
shipping of asparagus, rhubarb, artichokes, or lettuce.
I have found both these dishes peculiarly appetizing, but I
should be sorry if, in introducing Yucca as a food, I became
instrumental in the extermination of this universal and
wonderfully beautiful plant. For this reason I have hesitated
about including Yucca among these articles; but when I see the
bloom destroyed ruthlessly by thousands who cut it to decorate
touring automobiles and fruit and vegetable stands beside the
highways, who carry it from its native location and stick it in
the parching sun of the seashore as a temporary shelter, I feel
that the bloom stems might as well be used for food as to be so
ruthlessly wasted.
The plant is hardy in the extreme, growing in the most
unfavorable places, clinging tenaciously to sheer mountain and
canyon walls. After blooming and seeding the plant seems to have
thrown every particle of nourishment it contains into its
development, it dries out and dies (the spongy wood is made into
pincushions for the art stores); but from the roots there spring
a number of young plants, which, after a few years of growth,
mature and repeat their life cycle, while other young plants
develop from the widely scattered seeds.
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