the oddest recipe I may have ever seen!

[grasswire]

Today at an estate sale I picked up seven obscure old cookbooks very cheap. Most of them are regional things, and I love to look for oddities in them.

This may be the most odd recipe I've ever seen: jelly made from maple wings -- the seed pods that float down from maple trees.

Have you ever heard of anything like that? Have you even been tempted to eat one of those things?

[hippywife]

1. I've never even thought them to be edible

but I'm becoming more and more interested in foraging. I was waiting for books from my library but for some reason, they never did come. :shrug:

[Vinca]

2. I've got a tree by my driveway that spews those wings by the ton.

Could I get rich???:rofl:

[Phentex]

3. Those helicopter thingies?

I'm not sure I know what a maple wing is.

What do they use to make the jelly?

[REACTIVATED IN CT]

4. We used to open up the seed pods and stick the wings to our

noses when I was a kid in NYC . Never thought of eating them though.

[japple]

8. I remember doing that, too. They look kind of like rhino horns.

Funny, I thought my siblings and I were the only ones who did that!

[Sanity Claws]

12. I did that too

I lived in Queens

[Arkansas Granny]

5. You know you're going to have to post that recipe for us, don't you?

I'd love to see it. I have an abundance of these in the spring.

[Retrograde]

10. and report back on your results

Of course you're going to make some, right?

[Arkansas Granny]

11. It has certainly piqued my curiosity. You never know when

you might discover a real gem of a recipe in those old cookbooks.

[tigereye]

6. neat- it's fun to look at old cookbooks- fascinating!

[Denninmi]

7. Not heard of it. Never tried one, but ...

Could you post the recipe or at least describe the process -- are they picked green or mature? What species of maple - sugar, silver, red?

I enjoy learning new things. I found out last year you can make a very tasty syrup by boiling hickory bark in water to make a strong tea, and then adding sugar to that. You can also do this with maple bark. This is done in the winter time for best flavor. Not as good as the real thing made from sap, but still I was surprised at how good the flavor was.

[yellerpup]

9. What necessity mothered this invention?

If it is an old, old cookbook then l doubt that maple wing jelly was developed out of boredom simply for the fact that sugar was expensive. It would have been good to know that eating maple wings wouldn't kill you.