Meredith L. - Northeast Foraging: 120 Wild and Flavorful Edibles from Beach Plums to Wineberries

120 wild and flavorful edibles from beach plums to wineberries

LEDA MEREDITH

TIMBER PRESS

PortlandLondon

Frontispiece: A bowl of red currants still on their stems.

The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. All recommendations are made without guarantee on the part of the author or Timber Press. The author and publisher disclaim any liability in connection with the use of this information. In particular, eating wild plants is inherently risky. Plants can be easily mistaken and individuals vary in their physiological reactions to plants that are touched or consumed.

Copyright 2014 by Leda Meredith. All rights reserved.
Photography credits appear on .

Published in 2014 by Timber Press, Inc.

Book design by Benjamin Shaykin

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meredith, Leda.

Northeast foraging: 120 wild and flavorful edibles from beach plums to wineberries/Leda Meredith. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60469-601-1

1. Forage plantsNortheastern States. 2. Forage plantsHarvestingNortheastern States. I. Title. II. Title: One hundred twenty wild and flavorful edibles from beach plums to wineberries.

SB193.3.U5M47 2014

To my great-grandmother Yia-yia Lopi, who was my first foraging teacher

Yes, thats the right plant. Were going to cook the leaves tonight with a little garlic and olive oil, then well add a little lemon juice and My great-grandmother pressed the four fingers and thumb of one hand together and brought the fingertips to her lips for a smacking kiss. Her eyes sparkled with the anticipated pleasure of eating the dandelion greens Id just helped her pick. We were in San Franciscos Golden Gate Park, and I was three years old.

Great-grandma was from Greece, where to this day foraging for wild edible plants is part of the culture, as it is in many other countries. I doubt she ever learned the word foraging. To her, going out to pick the free, choice vegetables growing wild nearby was a normal thing to do. And naturally, she wanted to teach her great-granddaughter which plants were not only safe to eat, but tasty. And because she was excited about them, I was, too.

Excited is an apt way to describe how I feel to this day about foraging for wild edible plants. I get excited when I happen upon an unexpected, wonderful food find such as the abundant patch of mayapples I found this past summer. I get excited as each new ingredient comes into seasonand into my kitchen and onto my taste buds.

When I travel I sometimes get to taste a wild food for the first time, something that only grows there, and that, too, is excitingI love learning what here tastes like. I am as passionate about edible wild plants today as my great-grandma was.

Home to me for the past several decades has been New York; this book is about plants found in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, as well as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Rhode Island, and the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, Canada.

I love to see my students interact with our northeastern landscape in that special, seasonal way that experienced foragers enjoy. Is it June? Why then, theyre beelining for the mulberry trees. But a month later theyll be zipping past the no-longer-fruiting mulberriesand heading for the wineberries, whose season has just begun.

It is also delightful when a visitor to the Northeast is excited by their first chance to identify and eat the unique wild edible plants that are indigenous to this region.

With its tasty bulbs and chive-like leaves, field garlic is a common weed found in fall through spring.

I wish I could be with you in the field when you open up this book to help identify a plant you think just might be a choice wild edible. Id love to see the sparkle in your eyes when you confirm that yes, it is a tasty discovery.

But know that Ill be with you in spirit, giving you two thumbs up while you pause to consider harvesting the plant in a way that is beneficial to the natural landscape. And Ill be grinning right along with you the first time you taste it.

In an age when supermarkets stock an abundance of fruits and vegetables from around the world every day of the year, when farmers markets and community supported agriculture (CSA) produce are increasingly available and popular in the Northeast, why forage?

Delicious ingredients money cant buy: From the lemony green tartness of Japanese knotweed soup to creamy mayapple pulp and sweet but peppery spicebush berries, wild edible plants offer tastes and textures that are seldom found in any store. Its for that reason that many professional chefs adore wild foods.

In early spring, before dandelions flower, their leaves and crowns are at their tastiest.

From time to time a plant once reviled or utterly neglected becomes a restaurant darling and starts to appear at gourmet markets. Dandelion greens, purslane, lambs quarters, and stinging nettles are all available at farmers markets now, whereas less than a decade ago they were ignored as common weeds. And they arent cheap to purchasesometimes as much as four times the cost of cultivated vegetables, which brings me to the next reason to forage.

Free food: This may seem obvious, but its worth mentioning that wild edible plants are free food. Even if youre not in a lost-in-the-woods scenario, free food can definitely help make a healthy local foods diet more affordable.

Some wonderful foods that grow wild are also raised as commercial crops, but the lack of a price tag is a good reason to forage for them. Because I pick quarts of blackberries for free in the summer, I can ignore the little half-pint boxes offered for steep prices in the markets.

Another example: I recently saw lambs quarters (Chenopodium album) being sold as wild spinach for triple the price of cultivated spinach. I happened to be bringing home 1 pounds of the truly wild (but culinarily identical) version that Id just gathered for free. Okay, yes, I felt a little smug.

Nutrition: Popeye might have switched from spinach to nettles if hed known that nettles contain more protein than most other leafy greens, hefty amounts of chlorophyll, B vitamins, vitamins A, C, and D, plus minerals including calcium, iron, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, silicon, and sulfur.

Japanese knotweed and wild strawberry sorbet, garnished with violet flowers.