Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Cook's Guide entry for Fat Hen along with all the Fat Hen containing recipes presented on this site, with 6 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the Fat Hen recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain Fat Hen as a major wild food ingredient.

Fat Hen, (also known as: white goosefoot, lamb's quarters, lambsquarters, or pigweed); Chenopodium album is a fast-growing, upright, weedy annual species of goosefoot, very common in temperate regions, growing almost everywhere in soils rich in nitrogen, especially on wasteland. It tends to grow upright at first, reaching heights of 30-80 cm, but typically becomes recumbent after flowering (due to the weight of the foliage and seeds) unless supported by other plants. It is a member of the Amaranthaceae (the Amaranth family) and like most of the plants in this family bears flowers on long spikes.

Fat Hen can be eaten as a vegetable, either steamed in entirety, or the leaves cooked like spinach as a leaf vegetable. Each plant produces tens of thousands of black seeds. These are very nutritious, high in protein, vitamin A, calcium, phosphorus, and potassium. In the past it was grown as a poultry feed (both seeds and leaves). Indeed, Fat Hen seeds are some of the most common seeds frund in prehistoric sites indicating widespread consumption of the plant during prehistoric times.