St. Remedius Medical College: Baking Through the Apocalypse 2026

Why Cook When You Can Forage?

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

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The eternal situation: starving students. Whether hapless freshmen or overly deployed postgrads, the history of organized human education from its beginning is a cavalcade of stories and anecdotes about growing brains and the increasing need for nutrients versus the cost and the inexpensive but inadequate alternatives. Whether leftovers intended to be thrown out at cafeterias and restaurants, packages from home with enough extras to feed the rest of the dorm, or deliberations on whether butchering and cooking a roommate would be worth the nutritional return versus the inevitable prison time, students have always tried to get the maximum benefit of full bellies and minimal cost, as witnessed by the army ant stripping of buffet tables in department meetings by students who never darkened the doors at any other time, and St. Remedius Medical College was, true to form, not an exception.

One advantage St. Remedius students had over others was the sheer variety of available food in North Texas, if they recognized it as such. Many already had ornamental garden plants that required little to no preparation, such as ornamental cabbages, okras, and Black Pearl peppers, but autumn lasting into the end of November and spring generally getting an early start in February meant that dogeared copies of Euell Gibbons’s Stalking the Wild Asparagus left for the next generation of students got a workout. Peaches and pears in early summer were a given, as were pecans and acorns in autumn, and the more enterprising and/or ravenous found excuses to visit cattail clumps in industrial parks to stock up on Cossack asparagus. The more said about the culinary delights of edible puffball mushrooms in old cattle pastures, often growing the size of American footballs, the better, as puffball steaks, seared in a pan with a bit of oil, offered both gustatory delights and an alternative to meat on gathering expeditions: most of the accessible meat items in North Texas, from opossums to snapping turtles to water moccasins, tend to bite back. (While armadillos may be delicious, their propensity to jump high and hard enough to knock out the teeth of hunters leaning over them and their propensity to race off at high speed afterwards make them a very calorie-burning meal.)

An additional difference in the St. Remedius forager situation was the compassion held by former students to current students’ culinary suffering. A longrunning tradition with thaumaturgy majors was to send them to school each year with a full spice cabinet, especially since many mass-market spells and cantrips were just as dependent upon fresh spices as the meals afterwards, and one could usually tell the difference between a second-year Thaumaturgy devotee and a second-year engineering major based solely on the kitchen area containing more spices than oregano and garlic salt. For everyone else, they benefited from Botany Department experiments in fruit tree grafting (at St. Remedius, “oak apples” were much more than a type of wasp gall), gene splicing, and happy accidents, accidentally and deliberately spread through the campus. The clusters of Fuligo septica that emerged from flowerbeds and lawns before major thunderstorms tasted exactly like scrambled eggs when fried, but the real draw was involved the lines of redbud trees (Cercis candadensis) surrounding the Student Union and many of the dorms. Originally developed to incorporate F. septica‘s ability to capture and chelate zinc and other toxic metals in order to mitigate contaminated soils (the normally red-purple blooms changed to a wide range of colors depending upon the metals, from copper and cobalt to lead and radium, trapped within the tree’s woody tissues, and still surprise newcomers to Austin’s and Houston’s industrial parks every spring as to the sheer amount of poison in the local dirt), the original intent to concentrate metals to the point of being economical to refine them was offset by the trees’ surprising ability to bind the metals into unusable forms. This made them impractical for their original uses, but as decorative trees that collected minerals essential for human and other vertebrate health from the thick Dallas clay soil, the St. Remedius redbuds were a favorite of students. The blooms signaled impending spring break and the last easy period before finals, and if chowing down on handfuls of redbud blooms on the way to classes gave students an edge that they wouldn’t have had at other schools, nobody complained.

Ingredients

Redbud blooms (as many as you care to eat)

There’s not much to using redbud blooms. Cercis canadensis is a common ornamental tree throughout North America, often planted as much for the blooms at the beginning of spring as for their shade in the summer or their general toughness under a wide range of soil conditions. Since the trees are disease- and pest-resistant, the blooms are almost never sprayed with pesticides, so the potential risk to their consumption would be from air pollution or from contaminated water splashed on them from parking lots, driveways, or roofs. Even so, putting them in a strainer and giving them a good wash before eating them is a good idea, if only to make sure that any insects feeding on nectar or pollen inside the blooms get a chance to escape. As for their use, they’re excellent raw, in salads and as garnishes, and taste almost exactly like snowpeas. (Considering that C. canadensis is a member of the pea family, that’s not surprising.) They lose their color when stirfried for a long time, so drop them into a stirfry or atop a casserole at the last second to keep that wonderful purple coloration. Sadly, I haven’t found a way yet to keep them preserved that saves the color or the crunch, but considering the prolific blooms every spring, that may be an experiment this year before the blooms drop.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

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