Filed Under: Things That Smell Like Pines

Fermented Pine Mugolio, Ana Mendieta, & Le Temps De L’amour

Dear readers,

A warm welcome back to The Black Butter Club.

Firstly, a few updates. I was pleasantly surprised by the enthusiastic response to the newsletter rebrand, and even more so by the number of you asking whether the new logo might one day become a pin badge. As a longtime connoisseur of enamel accessories, I’ll see what I can do. It would be lovely to have something to share with you by the first anniversary of this strange and wonderful little publication.

In other news, I’m putting together a few online workshops for the summer. My plan (pending technical wizardry) is to host a live session, followed by an open Discord space where we can check in over the following week to make sure your projects are going well. While fermentation was the original focus, I’ve also had requests for sessions on flavour dynamics, photography and video, even writing workshops. So I’m putting the question to you, if you're interested in any of the above, let me know in the comments beneath this post (not via email, I don’t see those).

Now, let’s turn our attention to mugolio, the dark, forest-scented syrup of green pine cones, and the strange ways a tree can speak.

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In the Time of Pines: Mugolio, Memory, and the Language of Forests

When I first stepped over the threshold to the School of Art as a bright eyed first year student, I had no idea I’d walk beneath a Scots Pine to get there. Right in front of the department, half covering the car park, half a sloped grassy hill where students would lay, eat, laugh, and nap, was a miniature pine tree, its swooping branches as low as my head. It would be years later that I’d rediscover it, a long time after graduating, and make it a part of my yearly food traditions.

As it happens, the right time of year for green pine cones is around the same time as my birthday, June 5th (more on that later this week). Knowing your pine varieties is important, as not all are edible. For a list of what to avoid, what to look for, and kitchen practices that make sure you’re not doing something that might accidentally cause harm or irritation, see footnotes. In this newsletter, I’ll be focusing on Scots Pine, a variety that’s easily recognised by the female flowering stem with two pink balls at the tip (see image below).

image from woodfromthetrees.com

Tapping into Scent & Silence

The wind through the pine is not empty, it carries a language not of words, but of resin and rhythm, scent and silence. Each gust threads through the branches like breath, drawing out a dialect older than we are equipped to understand, but not so far removed that we cannot feel it.

Stand beneath a Scots pine, and you are standing in the presence of age. Some live for five centuries, having lived through glacial retreat and empires fall. Their stories are not only told in bark-carved rings, but in the way they mark the seasons with scent: sharp and citrus-green in spring, as tips unfurl; dense and balsamic by midsummer, when the sap is thickest; brittle, smoky, and quiet as winter dries their needles.

Their chemistry is their speech. Pinene whispers of citrus zest and turpentine, Borneol offers something deeper, almost medicinal. Camphene, limonene, sabinene, are a full aromatic lexicon, one that speaks in tinctures and teas, smoke and syrup. These molecules aren’t just passive byproducts of growth, they’re active participants in communication: attracting insects, repelling grazers, signalling stress to neighbouring trees. A forest in conversation, one that we experience through our senses of taste, smell, and touch.

And still, there are sounds, if you know how to hear them. The creak of wood shifting in the wind. The quiet crack of drying cones. The almost imperceptible hiss of sap moving beneath bark on a warm summer morning, or a resin blister bursting in the afternoon heat. When you brush against the bark and your fingers come back sticky, you’ve touched more than a tree. You carry its language on your skin.

There is a rhythm to this speed of life, that from our perspective embodies slowness, though I’m sure time passes in the blink of an eye for a tree (if they had eyes). A kind of work that doesn’t rush. The pine grows deliberately, drops its needles in spirals, softens the ground over years. It shapes its own climate, not out of force but through constancy. Waiting, in this world, is not passive. It is how things become.

This is what the pine reminds us of: that growth is not always visible. That stories can be held in scent. That transformation happens in stillness.

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A Trace in the Earth

Ana Mendieta and the Body as Landscape

There is a moment, when foraging pine cones, when the landscape becomes something more than a backdrop. You reach beneath the tree’s limbs, brushing aside the moss and the fallen duff, and for a second your hand disappears into the forest. In a brief moment, you are not separate from this place. You are of it. Present, briefly, like weather.

This moment, quiet and easy to miss, is where the work of Ana Mendieta begins.

A Body Rejoined with Earth

image from Tate.org

Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) was a Cuban-American artist whose practice blurred the lines between performance, sculpture, photography, and ritual (you can see why I’m a fan). After being exiled from Cuba as a child and raised in the United States, much of her work grappled with themes of displacement, identity, memory, and the female body’s relationship to the natural world.

Her Silueta Series (1973–1980), perhaps her most iconic body of work, involved the imprint of her body, or the suggestion of it, within the landscape. In earth, mud, grass, fire, and stone, Mendieta shaped voids where her form had been. Sometimes she lay directly in the earth and photographed the resulting impression. Sometimes she filled the outline with flowers or blood, letting the elements reclaim her gesture.

These works were transient by design. They were not intended to last, but to exist within the cycles of nature, to be changed by rain and erased by time. What remains is the documentation: a photograph, a relic of a presence. Her work was never about monumentality. It was about being there.

And that is precisely what links it to a quiet walk through a pine forest, foraging cones.

Foraging as Trace, Mugolio as Silueta

To forage respectfully, to bend low, observe, gather just enough, is to practice intimacy with place. It is not extraction. It is not conquest. It is a kind of choreography: the hand reaching, the fingers brushing earth, the body bending into the contours of the land.

When you gather young pine cones to make mugolio, that dark, syrupy distillation of forest and sunlight, you are, in effect, making your own silueta. Not as an image, but as an action that results in a bottle full of boreal syrup that speaks to us in the language of pine. You leave almost nothing behind but a softened patch of grass, a faint shift in the duff, a whorl in the resin where your fingers lingered.

Like Mendieta’s work, it is a gesture that dissolves into the land.

Mendieta’s use of her body, explicitly female, often nude, often vulnerable, was never about spectacle. It was about reclamation. In a world where the female body is so often objectified, commodified, controlled, she offered a radical alternative: the body as earth. The body not performing, but belonging.

Her imprints were not signs of ownership, but of integration. The body dissolving into soil. The outline becoming part of the terrain.

In many ways, this mirrors the quiet power of foraging and fermentation, often domestic and historically overlooked. Mendieta’s work was political in its silence, in its refusal to last, and in its merging of self with world. And so too is the act of learning the land on its own terms. Of letting your work vanish into the understory. Of finding value in what is slow, and handmade, fleeting, and uncommodified.

Landscape as Witness, Art as Offering

There’s something tender, and a little melancholic, about the idea that the land remembers us better than we remember it. Mendieta’s Siluetas, washed away by rain, faded by sun, live on in the soil, in the photographic grain, and in the muscle memory of the viewer who looks and feels something stir.

Both Mendieta’s work and the practice of wild foraging ask the same thing:
To slow down.
To pay attention.
To consider your presence as part of the landscape, not outside it.
To leave a trace, gentle, impermanent, and to honour it not by making it last, but by remembering that it was.

In the end, what you carry back from the forest is not just a basket of cones, or a reused plastic bag, it is a deepened relationship with place. A moment of stillness that provides a quiet thrill of being part of the world, not above it.

(I hope you have enjoyed this brief reflection on the work of an artist whose life was far too short. This week I celebrate my 37th year of life, making me one year older than Ana when she died. This section of the newsletter is in honour of her).

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The Tree That Watches, the Tree That Waits

Pine is a shaper of its own world.

Its fallen needles acidify the soil, changing which plants can grow beneath. Its shade slows evaporation, holding dampness close to the roots. Step quietly beneath a Scots pine and you may feel it: the sense that something is being held together below your feet. Not in metaphor, but in matter.

A pine tree does not grow alone. Its roots are embedded in a living matrix of mineral, moisture, and mycelium, fine fungal threads that lace through the soil and bind it into coherence. These threads, known as mycorrhizae, form an essential, ancient and widespread partnership on earth: a reciprocal bond between tree and fungus.

The pine offers sugars, made through the work of its needles and the long light of day. In return, the fungi gather what the tree cannot easily reach: phosphorus, nitrogen, micronutrients, and water drawn from deep pockets in the soil. This exchange nourishes both. But it also goes further. These fungal filaments link the pine to its neighbours, sometimes of the same species, sometimes not, forming a quiet fabric of reciprocity beneath the forest floor.

Through these connections, nutrients are not hoarded, but shared. A mature tree, whether aware or even in charge of such an act, may funnel carbon to saplings in the dim understory. A stressed or shaded pine may receive what it cannot produce itself. This is not sentiment. It is a system. A quiet logic shaped by millennia of evolution, where success is not measured by isolation, but by interdependence.

The pine’s influence doesn’t end with its roots. Its fallen needles slowly acidify the soil, making way for certain mosses, fungi, and understory plants while excluding others. Its shade alters the humidity and temperature at ground level, helping create the cool, damp conditions that fungal partners need to thrive. In this way, the pine reshapes its environment to suit a long-term relationship, not just with the visible forest, but within the invisible one beneath.

Among these fungal allies are species that fruit only in the presence of mature pine, their mushrooms rising briefly after rain, like signals from another world. And though we may not see the threads that bind them to the trees, we experience the fruit of their union, the trade of their nutrients, in the taste of mugolio.

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Fermentation as an Ecology of Patience

There’s something about the forest floor that teaches you to think in layers, in threads of fungal life weaving their way through loam and root.

Fermentation, in its own way, is not so different.

Open a jar of mugolio, weeks after you first layered sugar over green pine cones, and you’re entering another world of invisible life very different to the conditions most food is made these days. No whirring machinery, no shouting progress, just time, enzymes, ambient yeasts, and bacterial companions quietly altering everything. Softening edges. Deepening notes. Drawing sweetness from bitterness.

The microbial world, like the mycorrhizal one, is one of mutual shaping. The sugar feeds the microbes; the microbes transform the sugar. The resin is broken down, coaxed into new complexities. Acids rise, fragrant oils emerge. There’s no single actor, only the results of millions of dynamic relationships.

In fermentation, your role, much like the pine, is to facilitate.

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Mugolio: Pine Cone Syrup Recipe

Yield: Approximately 500ml of syrup
Time: 30 days maceration, plus 1-9 months fermenting

Ingredients

225 grams (8 oz) of young, green pine cones (soft enough to cut with a knife)
450 grams (16 oz) of brown sugar (light or dark; avoid white sugar for optimal flavor)

Note: For larger batches, maintain a 1:2 ratio by weight of pine cones to sugar.

Equipment

1-liter (quart) glass jar with a tight-fitting lid
Wooden spoon or spatula
Fine-mesh strainer or cheesecloth
Small saucepan
Clean glass bottles or jars for storage

1. Harvesting the Pine Cones

• When to Harvest: Late spring to early summer, when cones are still green and tender. Choose cones that are soft and can be easily sliced. Avoid those that are woody or fully matured.

2. Preparing the Mixture

• Gently rinse the pine cones to remove any debris, then pat them dry. Combine in a bowl, and mix the pine cones with the brown sugar until well coated.

• Transfer the mixture into the glass jar, pressing down to eliminate air pockets. Then seal the jar tightly.

3. Maceration Process

• Store the jar in a warm, sunny spot, like a windowsill and allow the mixture to macerate for about 30 days.

• Every few days, open the jar to release any built-up gases and stir the contents to ensure even mixing.

• Over time, the sugar will draw out moisture from the cones, creating a syrup.

4. Finishing the Syrup

• After a minimum of 30 days (I prefer to age mine for 6-9 months), pour the contents of the jar into a small saucepan, straining the pinecones from the mixture (save these for later).

• Gently heat the mixture over medium heat whilst stirring, until the sugar fully dissolves and the syrup becomes uniform. Avoid boiling.

5. Storage

• Pour the finished syrup into sterilized glass bottles or jars and allow it to cool to room temperature.

• You can store it in the refrigerator for up to 12 months, however I have stored it ambient for a year with no signs of spoilage.

Serving Suggestions

Drizzle over: Pancakes, waffles, or ice cream.
Enhance: Cocktails or teas with a spoonful.
Glaze: Roasted vegetables for a sweet, pine-infused flavor.

Leftover Pine Cones

A quick tip before you throw the cones out is to pickle them instead. To do this, place the cones in a saucepan with enough apple cider vinegar to cover them. Bring the pan to a simmer and cover the surface of the liquid with a cartouche. Continue to simmer for 3 hours, checking on the liquid to make sure the pan doesn’t run dry. Towards the end, remove the cartouche and pack the cones and vinegar together in jars. It will have turned a vibrant red colour. This is due to the extraction of the resin. Seal the jars and allow them to cool. Both the cones and the vinegar are edible, with a soft, grainy texture. They will keep for 12 months at room temperature, but should be consumed within a month once opened.

Closing Thoughts On The Bitterness That Heals

Brews, Balms, and the Forgotten Pharmacy of Pine

A long time before hops reigned in the tankards of Europe, pine was the flavour of choice. In the brewing traditions of northern Europe, particularly Scandinavia, pine needles, tips, branches, and even young cones were stirred into gruit ales. These were sharp, herbal, and wild. Resinous with a citrus edge, often cloudy with the wild yeasts of the forest itself. Before standardisation and the dominance of the hop flower, flavour was found closer to the ground. Pine brought bitterness, a flavour we don’t experience much these days, but also brightness. Complexity. A green heat that lingered on the tongue like the memory of walking through woods in spring.

That tradition is returning. Modern craft brewers, wild fermenters, and folk revivalists are once again adding pine tips to their meads and ales, not out of nostalgia, but because these flavours still speak. They offer something the palate has missed: something that feels alive. Not clean or polished, but elemental. Fermenters now flirt with this edge, balancing the green zip of citrus pine with the caramel smoothness of malt, the sweetness of honey with the ghost of resin. These are not flavours for forgetting, nor are they beers to get drunk on. They are a deeply complex connection to our past.

We’ve long known the pine as healer, not just as flavour. Folk medicine has treated it with reverence for centuries, boasting uses for the whole tree, with its needles and tips rich in vitamin C, which were steeped as tea to ward off winter illness and lift the spirit. The resin, with its antimicrobial bite, was chewed like gum or warmed into a balm for wounds. Even the inner bark, when dried and ground, offered sustenance in lean times, baked into famine bread when nothing else remained.

And our precious cones? They carried fire and fertility. Set beside the hearth, laid in cradles, or burned in solstice rites.

During the brutal winters of the Second World War, that knowledge was remembered out of necessity. In occupied Europe, where fresh fruit and vegetables were gone and supplies dwindled, people turned again to what they could find: snow, the wind, and pine. A handful of Scots pine needles in gently heated water created that citrus-scented tea powerful enough to fend off scurvy, and perhaps just as importantly, to bring comfort.

Try it yourself. Let the steam carry you somewhere older than your worries. Let it remind you that bitterness has its place. That healing can taste like trees.

• Studies and analyses (such as those from the USDA and various ethnobotanical journals) confirm pine needles as a viable source of vitamin C.

• British and American wartime survival guides included pine tea as an emergency option for seafarers and soldiers in cold climates.
  

Important caveat
The vitamin C content varies by species, season, and preparation method — so it’s not a perfect substitute for citrus, but in survival scenarios, it absolutely works.

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Until Next Time

I hope you’ve enjoyed this walk through my thoughts on pine. You might have seen in my recent Substack Note posts that I plan to be less strict with the timings of my newsletter in order to give myself and my guest writers the flexibility to make each offering its absolute best. Will I still be posted once a week? Yes, but more importantly for me is to ensure the quality is so high that they feel like a little gift when they appear in your inbox.

I also hope you’ve found something of value in the blending of subjects I find most fascinating. Flavour and food will always be at the forefront of these newsletters, but blending my love of food, my background in art, my time growing at the farm, the community of those who inspire me, things I point my camera at, and my shameless taste in music to bring you a unique experience and (hopefully) enrich your life in some small way. After all, it’s what’s most important to me.

Speaking of which, please find below this week's music offering, by the timeless Françoise Hardy.

I hope you have a wonderful week.
Until next time,

Sam

A Song for the Forest Path

As you finish reading, or go to gather cones, or stir your syrup for the first time, play this:

Le Temps de l'Amour – Françoise Hardy

A loping, steady groove, a walk through summer pines with purpose and lightness. That gentle joie de vivre, curiosity without urgency.

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Footnotes:

Further Reading.

Entangled Life by Merlin Shreldrake
Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard (thanks to Martin for the recommendation)

Important Information on Foraging Pine.

Toxic Varieties to Avoid

1. Ponderosa Pine (Pinus ponderosa)

   • Toxicity: Contains isocupressic acid, which can cause miscarriage in cattle and potentially in humans.

   • Risk: Primarily a concern for pregnant individuals.

   • Distribution: Western North America.
     

2. Lodgepole Pine (Pinus contorta)

   • Toxicity: Contains the same compounds as Ponderosa in smaller amounts.

   • Risk: Again, particularly risky for pregnant people.
     

3. Yew (Taxus species)

   • Not a pine!

   • Extreme toxicity. All parts (except the flesh of the berry-like aril) are deadly.

   • Risk: Causes heart failure.

   • Note: Yews are often mistaken for pines due to their evergreen needles. Always be sure of your ID.
     

4. Norfolk Island Pine (Araucaria heterophylla)

   • Not a true pine, but sometimes called one.

   • Mild toxicity to pets and potentially humans if ingested in quantity.

   • Common as a houseplant or ornamental.
     

Safe Pines Common in Europe and the UK

These are generally safe for food and medicinal use (assuming clean, pesticide-free harvesting):

• Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris) – ideal for mugolio and pine tea

• Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus) – high in vitamin C, often used in tea

• Red Pine (Pinus resinosa) – aromatic and safe

• Black Pine (Pinus nigra) – often used for incense, safe in small amounts

Important Foraging Notes

• Always forage away from roads, treated timberlands, or industrial zones.

• Avoid boiling pine for long periods, especially in enclosed vessels, it can concentrate resins that may irritate mucous membranes.

• Avoid if pregnant or nursing, unless you're absolutely certain the species is safe.
  

If uncertain, consult a local field guide or experienced forager. Misidentification can be dangerous.