Wild foods
I'm on my way out the door with a friend to pick wild asparagus. I also love to harvest chokecherries and elderberries and love to get my hands and taste buds on morels when my friends bring them to me.
Is Euell Gibbons still a wild food guru?
Is Euell Gibbons still a wild food guru?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by zic on -
Sadly, Euell took the compost road.
But I had a delicious steak with ramp (wild leek) on top a few weeks ago at Local 188, a great place in Portland ME with foraged foods. A few days ago, they had risotto with fiddle heads.
It's time for the milkweeds to sprout. Anyone out there tried them?
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Permalink Reply by Heather Wood on -
Back when I had a farm in upstate New York, I tried milkweed several times. I can't say that I ever took to it. The necessary repeated blanching is tiresome, and when I say "necessary" I'm not kidding. I love bitter greens like radicchio, dandelions, chicories, and broccoli raab, and after three blanchings milkweed is down to that level of bitterness, but after one or two it's still inedible as far as I'm concerned. My experience was with the unopened buds, and the leaves might be easier to learn to like.
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Permalink Reply by Beva on -
Hi Zic, I live in So. Maine and interested in where I can find wild leeks next spring. I remember my dad absolutly loved them with a ham dinner. His other thing was cow slip greens and Jerusalem artichokes. At one time I had a patch of artichokes, but they got rototilled.. poof! gone! I have not heard of this restaurant you mention... but we do love Flatbreads!!! Where is Local 188 in Portland? If you ever need wild blackberries... I have them! This year was quite bountiful and they were very huge! Do you have a veggie garden, or do you mostly forage?
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Permalink Reply by Harmony on -
What do you do with your chokeberries? No wild aspargus in my woods here in the mountains of Virginia or morels but they can be found in other parts of our county. Apparently they don't like pine trees because we are surrounded by them. There are other wild food gurus out there now. Do you know who they are? The way the economy is going there might be a return to wild foraging out of necessity!
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Permalink Reply by Penelope on -
I make chokecherry jelly and syrup. It's an acquired taste. The natives used to (some still do) dry them, pound them with dried meat to eat like granola. It's called Pemmican.
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Permalink Reply by Heather Wood on
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Recently I've been rereading all my foraging books and acquiring some new ones, and I'm interested to find that I still think the Euell Gibbons books are terrific. The recipes aren't very useful (no canned cream of mushroom sauce for me, please!) and the illustrations are less than first rate, but for sheer joy in his subject he's top-notch. It may be that a lot of my regard is because those were the books that first got me out in the woods and fields back when I was 12.
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Permalink Reply by Penelope on
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I'm recalling a 1976 book titled WHEN FRENCH WOMEN COOK by Madeleine Kamman. It's autobiographical vignettes of Kamman's childhood in several locations in France. She was sent to live with various people in the country for reasons I don't remember, could be WWII. She describes the women, the cooks, she lived with, how they foraged for wild mushrooms, some to eat and some to sell, and the truffle hunting, tiny clams off the coast of Brittany, how quite a lot of the food consumed was foraged. Areas she lived in were Poitou, Auvergne, Normandy, Savoie, Touraine, Alsace, Brittany and Provence. In one account a woman cooked everything in a fireplace, no stove in the cottage. And she never sat at table, but cooked and served as was customary. I think I'll dig it out and read it again.
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Permalink Reply by Heather Wood on
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I'll have to get that one too. I admire her writing but haven't read that book. I grew up in southern Louisiana and for Cajun people foraging was a way of life. I heard a little about it peripherally, but back when I was a child this was a major class distinction, and I wouldn't have been allowed within a mile of people who ate roast possum and things like that. Now I look back and wish I had learned from them, and of course I also wonder what possum tastes like. The economy being what it is, I may yet find out.
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Permalink Reply by Reba on -
Sam Thayer has an excellent book titled "Forager's Harvest". He conducts foraging workshops here in Wisconsin and elsewhere. His web site is: http://tinyurl.com/3ta7w3
Reba
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Permalink Reply by Heather Wood on
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Thanks, I just ordered his book. By the way, this is not a wild green, but it is a kind of foraged green; I made a hortapita last night and included in the greens mix a large romaine letuce that had started to bolt; it had just enough bitterness to give punch to the mild greens, but wasn't yet so bitter as to be inedible cooked, although it wasn't in any condition to be part of a salad.
By the way, I know I've already said this on another thread, but I encourage everyone to have a look at Paula Wolfert's book Mediterranean Grains and Greens. It's not a foraging manual, but is full of great dishes to make with foraged greens when you find them.
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Permalink Reply by Heather Wood on
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Hmm, got me. I guess I'm trying to distinguish my usual cultivated plants from wildings and from things I planted on purpose but am using different parts of or using in a different season or condition than that for which I planted it. It's a very dubious distinction, though, and I guess that calling my radishes "cultivated" while calling my radish greens "foraged" is fairly absurd. Maybe radish tops, outer leaves of cabbage, and all that stuff should be "reclaimed," not "foraged." So currently I'm "reclaiming" bolted lettuces, squash tendrils, outer leaves of this and that, and a lot of other green stuff that may be useful but isn't described in cookbooks.
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