Largely inspired by Mangetout’s (excellent food site)
What wild foods have you eaten? “Wild foods” being food you’ve gathered/hunted yourself that aren’t regular farm crops. Not including fish, but including all hunted animals.
What was especially good? Especially bad?
I’ll start with some standouts:
I’ve eaten many wild berries, of course, but like Mangetout, wild blackberries are a favourite. It’s definitely the smell.
Bullrushes (cattails) - Flower-heads boiled like corn-on-the-cob, little flat cakes of bullrush pollen, and tender young shoots chopped up as greens. Yum. Except the pollen cakes, didn’t hold together very well.
Kelp - practically identical to the Japanese kombu variety, our local giant kelp makes a nice clear stock after being dried. With a little bonito flake it’s a lovely base for ramen soup.
Seaweed Jelly - Red seaweed boiled with sugar makes an interesting pale red jelly. Not very flavourful but worth trying, set wonderfully and may be useful as a base for other flavours.
Guinea Fowl - Killed by me with a boomerang (I shit you not!), cooked in clay, tinker-style. Lovely, if a leeeetle dry. Could maybe have done with a berry jelly or something.
“Sorrel”/“Sour Grass”/“Suuring” (Yellow Oxalis) - Not the same as the leafy green herb, but I didn’t know that at the time. I usually pick a few stems to chew on for their lovely tart taste (too much is bad for the digestion, though - oxalic acid), but I’ve also made a dressing for fish from it. Nice lemony flavours.
So, any contributions? I’m not looking for a list of everything you’ve ever gathered/hunted here, but more a review collection.
I haven’t eaten too many foods that are considered strictly “wild” (in the sense that you can’t buy them in the grocery store), but here’s a short list of what I have eaten in its natural state - ie. growing in the wild.
Berries - wild raspberries are a common sight when hiking, usually along the edges of a few of the more naturalised trails throughout the city, and you will occasionally run across blackberry and mulberry (I’m lucky enough to have both raspberries and mulberry growing in my yard as well). I’ve also had wild blueberries while hiking in Northern Quebec.
Mangoes - picked right off the tree while travelling in Brazil. It took me a while to readjust to grocery store mangoes after that… they taste much better fresh-picked and still warm from the sun.
Sumac - also plentiful along hiking trails in and out of the city. The berries are fuzzy and lemony, yum!
Wild greens - I’ve had salad made from wild dandelions, which was tasty, but nothing special enough to go through the trouble of finding wild dandelions that aren’t covered in pesticides. Soup with boiled nettles was interesting, but again, not really good enough that I’d actively seek out nettles for this purpose.
Mushrooms - just once, because I was walking with an experienced forager that could be trusted to tell the edible from the lethal (or merely unpleasant).
My favorite would have to be berries - I picked 40+ cups of blackberries on my land last year (Hard to get an exact count when you’re eating every third or fourth one!), as well as a few cups each of wild blueberries, wild strawberries, thimbleberries, + raspberries.
Maple syrup - made a galon this year.
Fiddlehead ferns - Should be up soon! Yum!
Wintergreen - tastes like wintergreen candy (imagine that!)
Cattail shoots - white inner heart tastes like cucumber + corn
Asparagus - Just like cultivated. Probably escaped.
Wild greens - dandelions, lamb’s quarters, several others I’ve forgotten the names of.
Poor man’s pepper - tastes like it sounds, pretty much like ground black pepper.
Staghorn sumac (Not poison sumac) flower heads soaked in water for a few hours, strain, chill, add sugar to taste - Makes a very refreshing lemonade like drink.
Antelope, Deer, Elk, Rattlesnake, Quail, Pheasant, Squirrel, Duck, and Grouse for the game. Dandilion greens, acorns, cat tails, loads of berries, honeysuckle (does that count?) and cactus for the plants.
Fiddlehead ferns, wild greens, honeysuckle, redbud seed pods and mint (not sure what kind of mint, except the kind we picked and put in our ice tea). A friend once served me some homemade dandelion wine. Rabbits, squirrels, elk and deer. I really like venison a lot and I still have part of a backstrap that my neighbor gave me in the freezer. I’ve had snails and frogs and snakes, but I assumed they were raised for the purpose.
muscadines and scuppernongs -wild grapes in these parts - good for jellies and wine but thick tart skins and lots of seeds make them a bit dicey as munchies
poke salad - my hillbilly aunt made this when I was a kid; don’t remember much about it. She says you have to use young tender leaves and boil several times to eliminate toxin. She also cooked dandelion greens, but I never had those. I used to make ink with the poke berries as a kid.
bobwhite quail - my dad was a devoted hunter. Picking out the shotgun pellets made dining on quail a less than optimal experience.
I grew up close to the forest, and as I remember we used to walk around and try out most things to chew on. Somehow I never got ill from it.
Berries - blueberries, lingonberries, cloudberries, raspberries, strawberries - everything I could get my grubby little hands on when I was a kid. Of course, lingonberries aren’t really edible until you’ve turned them into jam.
Mushrooms - my mum is an enthusiastic mushroom picker and would bring them home by the basket in autumn. Freshly picked mushrooms fried in butter are just something completely else than your ho-hum, everyday store-bought mushrooms.
Nettles - fried in butter on toast, or made into a soup. Really painful to pick unless you know the trick (I don’t).
Various roots, shoots and plants - polypody (great for when you have a licourice craving), wood sorrel, pine buds, and oh, a delicacy - blueberry flowers. You sucked out the honey.
My mum used to make lemonade out of elderflower, and an excellent dandelion wine.
Tons of mushrooms – the Southern Oregon coast is rife with good ones, for an experienced hunter. Chanterelles, black trumpets, oysters, hedgehogs, and the occasional matsutake. Delicious treats whenever I’m visiting home.
Also various berries: black, salmon, thimble (thimbleberries are so good!).
And, of course, crabs, clams, and mussels that my family harvested ourselves.
In my misspent youth I did Outward Bound - we ate pretty much anything that wasn’t actually poisonous [ok, technically acorns are sort of poison until you leach out all the tannic acid, and rattle snake is poisonous if it strikes you …] my father took my brother and I hunting and fishing so I am pretty comfortable killing and cleaning my own food as well as cooking it.
I prefer the grocery store, but the eggs from my poultry rule for freshness and taste, as does the poultry [and sheep when we kept some] because we control the diet and health=)
Many of mine are listed on the site kindly linked by the OP, but here goes (from memory)…
Sea beet (like spinach, only nice)
Dandelions (roots made into ersatz coffee - which wasn’t bad, but I may not be the best judge)
Sorrel - true sorrels and wood sorrel (oxalis)
Ground elder
Several types of wild garlic/onion
Hawthorn leaves
Beech leaves
Lime (Tilia spp) flowers
Ash keys (the immature winged seeds)
Walnuts
Chestnuts
Beechnuts
Hazelnuts
Earthnuts (not a nut, but the tuberous root of a carrot-family plant)
Gorse (furze) flowers (not nice)
Hedge Mustard (not nice)
Marsh samphire (gotta get some more of this one soon - it’s excellent)
Rock samphire (unrelated to the above, tastes like varnish, but in a strangely good way)
Sea purslane
Sea kale
Sea peas (picked on Chesil Beach)
Clover (flowers and leaves)
Watercress
Rocket
Bittercress
Cuckoo flower
Bog myrtle
Blackberries
Raspberries
Dewberries
Various other species and hybrids of Rubus - I know a wooded area where there are a number of different naturally-occurring hybrids - some like loganberries - others like red dewberries, etc.
Bilberries (like a small blueberry)
Wild strawberries
June berries
Hawthorn berries
Crab apples
Wild plums and cherries of numerous kinds
Elderberries (and flowers)
Crayfish (this was an all-round fun experience)
Shore crabs
Limpets
Mussels
Squirrel
Rabbit
Ceps and a couple of other species of boletes
Several species of Agaricus (field and wood mushrooms)
Chanterelles
Giant puffballs
St George’s Mushrooms
Amethyst Deceiver
Shaggy inkcaps
Parasol mushrooms (didn’t like)
Saffron milkcaps
Obviously I’m looking to expand the list at every opportunity. Items on the agenda for this year include: Brown shrimp, razor clams, acorns
Service berries (sorry, don’t know that latin) are my favorite: yummy and so much easier to harvest than wild raspberries!
Stir fried or steamed nettles with lots of garlic and some Boursin cheese are another favorite, and Mahna Mahna, there’s really no secret to picking them other than to wear gloves. If you do get stung though, you take a few leaves and mash the shit out of them with a coupla rocks and smear the resultant goo on the sting. The antidote to the sting in inside the leaf, and once you bruise it, the stingers wilt.
I always look forward to the first feast of fried dandelion flowers - bread 'em up and fry 'em just like mushrooms! But pick a lot, and soak 'em in deep water first so get the sand and bugs out.
Hey no kidding, you can do that? That would make an easy and quick (both in prep and in ease of location) side dish for shore lunches. Man cannot live on walleye fillets alone, though lord knows I’ve tried.
When it comes to wild food, I know that the OP disallowed fish, but honestly there’s nothing like catching a bunch of walters and frying their little glassy eyed selves up right on the shore. Even people who hate fish will go bonkers over fresh walleyes. Mmmmm…Can’t wait for Wisconsin to open the sportfishing season next month…
Morels! Rolled in cornmeal and fried in butter. Oh my god, so good. The season is starting soon, and I hope my contacts come through this year. C’mon, rainstorm followed by intense heat!
Chokecherry jelly. Honestly, it’s more like chokecherry-colored sugar syrup than anything else.
Add to that the usual component of blackberries, blackcaps, wild grapes, gooseberries, wild plums, wild apples, dandelions, and wild game, mostly venison.
Dammit. Now I want some morels with some fried crappies (that’s a fish, guys), both in cornmeal. And rhubarb crisp to follow, but that’s not wild. I’ve got a while to wait for most of that.
Berries: strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, June berries, chokecherries.
Wild roses - both the petals in salad and the hips in the fall. No other rose smells as sweet, either.
Dandelions - the blossom is delicious on its own, but the greens are bitter.
Pine cambium is…interesting.
Wild-harvested pine nuts.
Cattail shoots - sort of like slimy cucumber.
Wild oat groats. Wholesome, but difficult to harvest.
Acorns.
Wild meats: rattlesnake, deer (mule and key deer), grouse (yummy but tiny), elk, quail.
I feel kind of strange about being upset that, because our house was built last year, we have no lawn yet and so no dandelions in the lawn. Shouldn’t I be rejoicing that there is not a dandelion to be seen?
