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Wild Seasons: Gathering and Cooking Wild Plants of the Great Plains
For nature lovers as well as cooks, there's plenty to whet the appetite in this unique field guide-cum-cookbook. Starting with the first plants ready for eating in the early spring (watercress and nettles) and following the sequence of harvest through the late fall (persim-mons and Jerusalem artichokes), Kay Young offers full, easy-to-follow directions for identifying, gathering, and preparing some four dozen edible wild plants of the Great Plains. And since most of the plants occur elsewhere as well, residents of other regions will find much of interest here.
'This is not a survival book," writes the author; "only those plants whose flavor and availability warrant the time and effort to collect or grow them are included." The nearly 250 recipes range from old-time favorites (poke sallet; catnip tea; horehound lozenges; hickory nut cake; a cupboardful of jams, jellies, and pies) to enticing new creations (wild violet salad, milkweed sandwiches, cattail pollen pancakes, day-lily hors d'oeuvres, prickly-pear cactus relish).
Reflecting the author's conviction that just as we can never go back to subsisting wholly on wild things, neither should we exclude them from our lives, this book serves up generous portions of botanical information and ecological wisdom along with good food.
'This is not a survival book," writes the author; "only those plants whose flavor and availability warrant the time and effort to collect or grow them are included." The nearly 250 recipes range from old-time favorites (poke sallet; catnip tea; horehound lozenges; hickory nut cake; a cupboardful of jams, jellies, and pies) to enticing new creations (wild violet salad, milkweed sandwiches, cattail pollen pancakes, day-lily hors d'oeuvres, prickly-pear cactus relish).
Reflecting the author's conviction that just as we can never go back to subsisting wholly on wild things, neither should we exclude them from our lives, this book serves up generous portions of botanical information and ecological wisdom along with good food.
- GenresNonfiction
318 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 8, 2019
I ordered a used copy of this book after seeing a recipe for Purple Passion Pie using elderberry juice from this book online (that's it on the cover), and was delighted to find that it was such a fantastic little read. It's one of those delightful older foraging books written by an author who loved the subject and dedicated years of her life to learning and teaching about it.
Young is from Nebraska, so the foraging information is best suited for midwesterners. There are simple black and white drawings for ID, so you need to consult with other sources for positive identification of new plants. You should do that anyway, though. Young provides basic information and then a few recipes for each wild food she covers, which are arranged by appearance in the year (thus elderflowers are earlier in the book than elderberries, even though they are both elder).
There are about 50 wild plants covered, and our family forages probably 40 of them. She covers pretty standard wild foods that are tasty and usually plentiful, such as lambs quarters (goosefoot), wild grapes, elderberries, pawpaws, black walnuts, cattails, mint, mulberries, purslane, sand cherries, raspberries, nettles, dandelions, wild asparagus, watercress, milkweed and violets. For each, she offers a sketch, detailed description, distribution, habitat, seasons to collect, cautions, additional information and recipes.
I love how dedicated Young is to this subject, which makes the book a delight for anyone who also loves foraging. For instance, she writes about how Euell Gibbons said stinging nettles could be used as a vegetarian substitute for rennet in cheese making because it coagulates milk, and says she not only tried to do it with all kinds of milk (powdered, canned, fresh...) but after reading about it again in another book, she sought out two chemists at a local dairy to help her try to do it. None of them were ever able to find any way at all to make it work and tests showed nothing particular in nettles that would do so, but she writes that she has not given up experimenting. Then she goes on to tell you lots of other wonderful things about nettles and what to do with them.
This isn't a book to get if you like lots of shiny pictures and just a couple of paragraphs to tell you what to forage. This is a book to read in the bath on a cold winter day to plan out next year's foraging adventures, to flip through when your family brings home buffalo berries and you want to know what to do with them, or to try out new recipes for favorite wild foods when you find a bounty. It's one of my favorite foraging books, which is saying a lot as I own many.
Young is from Nebraska, so the foraging information is best suited for midwesterners. There are simple black and white drawings for ID, so you need to consult with other sources for positive identification of new plants. You should do that anyway, though. Young provides basic information and then a few recipes for each wild food she covers, which are arranged by appearance in the year (thus elderflowers are earlier in the book than elderberries, even though they are both elder).
There are about 50 wild plants covered, and our family forages probably 40 of them. She covers pretty standard wild foods that are tasty and usually plentiful, such as lambs quarters (goosefoot), wild grapes, elderberries, pawpaws, black walnuts, cattails, mint, mulberries, purslane, sand cherries, raspberries, nettles, dandelions, wild asparagus, watercress, milkweed and violets. For each, she offers a sketch, detailed description, distribution, habitat, seasons to collect, cautions, additional information and recipes.
I love how dedicated Young is to this subject, which makes the book a delight for anyone who also loves foraging. For instance, she writes about how Euell Gibbons said stinging nettles could be used as a vegetarian substitute for rennet in cheese making because it coagulates milk, and says she not only tried to do it with all kinds of milk (powdered, canned, fresh...) but after reading about it again in another book, she sought out two chemists at a local dairy to help her try to do it. None of them were ever able to find any way at all to make it work and tests showed nothing particular in nettles that would do so, but she writes that she has not given up experimenting. Then she goes on to tell you lots of other wonderful things about nettles and what to do with them.
This isn't a book to get if you like lots of shiny pictures and just a couple of paragraphs to tell you what to forage. This is a book to read in the bath on a cold winter day to plan out next year's foraging adventures, to flip through when your family brings home buffalo berries and you want to know what to do with them, or to try out new recipes for favorite wild foods when you find a bounty. It's one of my favorite foraging books, which is saying a lot as I own many.
February 26, 2018
This is a fun resource for edible wild plants. I did read all the plant descriptions and identifying characteristics. I did not read all the recipes but checked them out enough to be tempted by many!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews