The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants
Easy to Pick, Easy to Prepare
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Field-to-table cuisine! Connect with (and eat) the diverse flora around us.
A recent rise in the popularity of urban farming, farmers’ markets, and foraging from nature means more people are looking for information about plants. In The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants, botanists Lytton John Musselman and Harold J. Wiggins coach you on how to safely identify, gather, and prepare delicious dishes from readily available plants—and clearly indicate which ones to avoid.
More than 200 color illustrations, accompanied by detailed descriptions, will help you recognize edible plants such as nettles, daylilies, river oats, and tearthumbs. For decades, Musselman and Wiggins have taught courses on how to prepare local plants, and their field-to-table recipes require only a few, easily found ingredients. They offer instructions for making garlic powder out of field garlic and turning acorns into flour for Rappahannock Acorn Cakes. To toast your new skill, they even include recipes for cordials.
The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants is a great gift for the beginning naturalist and the perfect addition to every serious forager’s library.
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This short but informative guide introduces readers to a small but intriguing variety of forageable edibles, beginning, wisely, with detailed descriptions and pictures of poisonous plants to avoid. Musselman, a botany professor, and Wiggins, an environmental scientist with the Army Corps of Engineers, have chosen plants that "are easy to identify and do not have any toxic look-alikes." These include widely known tasties such as blueberries; flora that may be familiar in landscaping or as weeds but perhaps not as food, such as daylily, oak, red spruce, dock, and kudzu; less-known edibles like glasswort and nutsedge; and fungi. Descriptions include historical, botanical, collecting, and preparation information, as well as possible health benefits. The authors have put considerable work into discovering plants with enough edible content to make them worthwhile to collect and eat. As they admit, however, "Concocting these recipes drew upon our passion for plants more than our culinary expertise." Although Boy Scout and Girl Scout types may enjoy the bare-bones recipes, slow- and wild-food aficionados may need to follow the authors' advice to "use your own imagination in crafting recipes." 116 color illus.
