Those delicate tassels dangling from hazel branches each February aren’t just a promise of spring, they’re also a reminder of how desperately hungry our ancestors sometimes were.
In 19th-century Poland, poor peasants gathered hazel catkins during przednówek, literally ‘before-the-new’, that precarious gap between winter stores running out and spring crops coming in. What we call ‘the hungry gap’.
They called them rzęsy, meaning ‘eyelashes,’ and mixed them into sourdough bread to stretch their grain supplies.
The science behind this makes sense. Pollen is nutritionally dense, roughly 23% protein, 36% carbohydrates, 11% fat, comparable to dried beans. Other cultures recognised this: the Maori made pua from cattail pollen, steaming it into something that supposedly tastes like sweet gingerbread. In Iraq, they still sell kharet, a sweet made from cattail pollen and sugar.
But this is where traditional knowledge and modern understanding clash. Pollen has an extraordinarily tough outer wall that our digestive enzymes struggle to crack. Studies show we can only digest about 3% of the carbohydrates in pollen, though we manage 59% of the proteins. The Polish method of sourdough fermentation likely helped break down those walls. So did the Iraqi technique of mixing with sugar, which creates osmotic pressure that cracks the pollen open.
Yet despite this fascinating history, you might not want to eat hazel catkins.
There’s zero modern research on their safety. Hazel is viciously allergenic, those catkins are literally pollen factories, and the proteins that trigger respiratory allergies can cause severe reactions when ingested. Even hazelnuts accumulate heavy metals like nickel, and nobody’s tested catkins for contaminants.
Survival food isn’t the same as safe food. Leave the catkins for the bees.
Reference: Luczaj, L. (2021, March 7). Kharet, rząsy and pua… Can we digest pollen? Will hazel and cattail cakes become a new-old hip health food? The Wild Food.