The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants: Easy to Pick, Easy to Prepare

by Lytton John Musselman, Harold J. Wiggins

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421424293
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	07/27/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.30(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lytton John Musselman is the Mary Payne Hogan Professor of Botany and manager of the Blackwater Ecologic Preserve at Old Dominion University. He is author of A Dictionary of Bible Plants and Figs, Dates, Laurel, and Myrrh: Plants of the Bible and the Quran.

Harold J. Wiggins is a wetlands ecologist and environmental scientist who spent over 24 years with the Regulatory Program, US Army Corps of Engineers. He is the cofounder of the Fredericksburg chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society and the author of Virginia Native Plants.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
Wild Plants as Food
Before You Begin
Emergency Food
How to Use This Book
Guidelines for Using the Recipes .
About Flavorings, Sweeteners, and Oils
Beverages
Recipes for Failure
2. Deadly Harvest
Poison Ivy, Poison Oak, Poison Sumac
Poison Hemlock
Mushrooms
3. Nature's Storehouse of Edible Plants
4. Condiments
Sassafras
Field Garlic
5. Aperitifs
Swamp Bay
Red Spruce
6. Greens
Chicory
Curly Dock
Glasswort
Kudzu
Stinging Nettle
Black Walnut
7. Starches
American Lotus
Arrowhead
Groundnut
Nut Sedge
Oaks
Softstem Bulrush
Spring Beauty
8. Grains and Plants Used Like Grains
Cane
Manna Grass
River Oats
Yellow Pond Lily
9. Flowers
Black Locust
Cattails
Orange Day Lily
Redbud
10. Sweets
Indian Strawberry
Pawpaw
11. Cordials
Blueberries
12. Mushrooms
Oyster Mushroom
Chicken of the Woods
Puffballs
Index of Recipes

What People are Saying About This

Garrison Keillor

Dr. Musselman is a passionate botanist. Walking among plant life makes him very happy, which means he is happy most of the time, except when riding in a car stuck in a long tunnel. He will stop people on the street to tell them some great news from the plant world.

Samuel Thayer

Drawing from a lifetime of foraging experience, Musselman and Wiggins expand the reader's food gathering repertoire with simple recipes and a fascinating assortment of plants largely overlooked by the wild food literature.

From the Publisher

Dr. Musselman is a passionate botanist. Walking among plant life makes him very happy, which means he is happy most of the time, except when riding in a car stuck in a long tunnel. He will stop people on the street to tell them some great news from the plant world.
—Garrison Keillor

Drawing from a lifetime of foraging experience, Musselman and Wiggins expand the reader's food gathering repertoire with simple recipes and a fascinating assortment of plants largely overlooked by the wild food literature.
—Samuel Thayer, author of The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants

Editorial Reviews

The book is witty and full of commonsense. It is a jolly good read for anyone.
—Portland Book Review

Whether this is your passion or merely something you might be interested in learning about, check out The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants . . . Should I ever get a craving for stinging nettle omelet or black locust fritters, I will know exactly which wild edible plant book to look in.
—Aiken Standard

From the Publisher

The book is witty and full of commonsense. It is a jolly good read for anyone.

Portland Book Review

05/06/2013
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. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Whether this is your passion or merely something you might be interested in learning about, check out The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants . . . Should I ever get a craving for stinging nettle omelet or black locust fritters, I will know exactly which wild edible plant book to look in.

Aiken Standard

Whether this is your passion or merely something you might be interested in learning about, check out The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants... Should I ever get a craving for stinging nettle omelet or black locust fritters, I will know exactly which wild edible plant book to look in.

The Aiken Standard

The fact that as many as 50 books explain how to find, collect, and prepare wild plants for a meal speaks to the popularity of the endeavor. Whether this is your passion or merely something you might be interested in learning about, check out The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants... Should I ever get a craving for stinging nettle omelet or black locust fritters, I will know exactly which wild edible plant book to look in.

The Aiken Standard - Whit Gibbons

The book is witty and full of commonsense. It is a jolly good read for anyone.

Portland Book Review - Jane Manaster