Brill - The wild vegan cookbook : a Foragers culinary guide (in the field or in the supermarket) to preparing and savoring wild (and not so wild) natural foods

T HE H ARVARD C OMMON P RESS
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Boston, Massachusetts 02118
www.harvardcommonpress.com

Copyright 2002, 2010 by "Wildman" Steve Brill

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper

Originally published in hardcover as The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brill, Steve.

[Wild vegetarian cookbook]:

The wild vegan cookbook : a forager's culinary guide (in the field or in the supermarket) to
preparing and savoring wild (and not so wild) natural foods / "Wildman" Steve Brill ; foreword by
Arthur Schwartz.Pbk. ed.
p. cm.
Reprint. Originally published: The wild vegetarian cookbook, 2002.
ISBN 978-1-55832-721-4 (alk. paper)
1. Vegetarian cookery. 2. Cookery (Wild foods) I. Title.
TX837.B824 2010
641.5'636dc22
2009052868

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Book design by Susan McClellan
Illustrations by Linda Hillel
Cover design by Deborah Kerner/Dancing Bears Design
Cover photographs by Alexandra Grablewski, except fiddlehead photograph by PhotoDisc

This book is dedicated to all the nonviolent environmental activists
worldwide who have risked physical injury, financial loss, and their liberty
to keep our planet green, vibrant, and alive.

N ATURALIST AND AUTHOR "W ILDMAN " S TEVE Brill has been guiding foraging tours throughout the Northeast since 1982, both independently and for such clients as New York City, the Stone Barns Center for Food, the Queens Museum of Art, and IBM. He also lectures for schools and youth programs, museums, libraries, and environmental groups. He is the author of Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places. Visit him at www.wildmanstevebrill.com.

C ALL ME FORAGER . T HAT'S MY NAME IN THE New York City Parks Department book of department nicknames, courtesy of former Parks Commissioner Henry Stern, but inspired by "Wildman" Steve Brill.

It wasn't until I read the introduction to this book that I realized it has been nearly 20 years since I took my first foraging walk with the Wildman. I don't remember where exactly we went that first time out, but, courtesy of Steve Brill, I now know places around my great and vast city where I can find all sorts of delicious wild foods. On the beach in Breezy Point, in the Rockaways, a section of Gateway National Park where Fort Tilden used to be, there are rose hips to make a vitamin-C-rich tea, beach plums for jelly, and lemony sorrel for salads and seasoning. Amazingly, within earshot of traffic on the Long Island Expressway, in the center of Queens, peppery watercress surrounds an underground mineral spring that wells up in a sandy, wild section of Alley Pond Park. You can even drink the water!

Because the Wildman taught me, either first hand or through his first book, Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places, I can now tell the difference between young dandelions and new green shoots of chicory. I have gathered gingko nuts in tranquil Greenwood cemetery, in the heart of Brooklyn. I have trespassed in a private, but neglected, row-house garden to harvest chickweed (delicious and worth the risk of arrest!). I know the difference between the very similar leaves of wild onions and wild garlic. I invariably notice that there are succulent leaves of purslane growing in the cracks of the sidewalk everywhere. And before they fall and stain the street, I gather the mulberries from a tree on my corner in Brooklyn. Yes, more than one tree grows here.

No one thinks of New York as having much green space. "Out-of-towners," which is how New Yorkers refer even to foreigners, don't realize that not only do we have many huge parks besides Manhattan's Central Park, but also that there are numerous "vest-pocket" or small neighborhood parks, and even several bird and animal wilderness refuges. It doesn't matter where you live on this planet. Nature is so persistent and varied that any of us can forage for our dinner.

This was an amazing fact to me back in 1983, when I first met the Wildman. It was a new idea, too, to thenParks Commissioner Henry Stern, who happened to be an old friend. How fortunate for Wildman that Henry didn't get it. Henry thought Wildman was destroying the parks by taking groups of New Yorkers through them and pointing out the edibles, picking the weeds and gathering the nuts, berries, seeds, and occasional wild mushroom. Henry had the Wildman arrested by a park ranger while the Wildman was digging up a dandelion. The media loved the story. The arrest made Wildman famous. It made Henry look like a dope and a bully. How could picking dandelion greens be hurting the environment, as Stern said?

To help them both, I called Henry. "You don't get it," I said. "This guy lives on the edge. He isn't making a fortune on the parks. He barely pays his rent. He eats only what he finds. And toward the public good, he is teaching people an appreciation of the parks that they would never otherwise have."

Henry is actually smart, and a good politician. Instead of continuing to prosecute the Wildman, he made him an official park guide, an employee of the city. Everyone benefited. Indeed, Wildman Steve Brill got to go home with a paycheck.

At the time, I was the executive food editor of the New York Daily News. Back then, the New York Public Library organized a fundraiser called "The Night of 100 Dinners," in which 100 of the city's more famous hosts and hostesses welcomed paying guests into their homes for an evening of good food and conversation. My publisher, James Hoge, generously offered to organize one in his grand apartment on Gramercy Park and he asked me to plan it and cook it.

As the food editor of the nation's greatest tabloid newspaper (well, at least the most famous), I came up with a theme that echoed the street-corner newsboys of old and parodied my newspaper's famous in-your-face and often alliterative headlines (Remember the one about our former president? "Ford To New York: Drop Dead.") The dinner was called "Extra, Extra, Eat All About It: Fine Food from the Five Boroughs."

The idea was that everything we are would be grown or produced in New York City. We planned on serving a Brooklyn bouillabaisse, using fish and shellfish brought in by the charter boats of Sheepshead Bay. The smoked salmon for an appetizer was processed in Brooklyn. Pastries and cakes were easy. New York has more than its share of great bakeries. For dessert, we set out a Viennese table, a buffet with dozens of sweets from every borough.

The dinner was in early November, so vegetables were a problem. We were able to buy some cool weather crops, broccoli and winter squash, from the last working farm left in the city, a small plot on Staten Island. But where would we find salad?

Wildman Steve Brill to the rescue! We went for a foraging trip through several parks and a number of verdant side streets (that's when I had to trespass to gather chickweed) and found garlic mustard, field garlic (it looks like scallions), and winter cress, to name of few of our greens. The Wildman knew where to find each and every one, and at the end of a long day of food gathering, we returned to his apartment for a snack.