Where the Wild Foods Are

Posted: June 22nd, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Event, Marblehead | Tags: , , , , , , | No Comments »

Ready for the hottest food experience around? Try your backyard, followed by your kitchen. We’re talking about foraging, and we learned more than we ever thought possible about what’s edible in this neck of the woods when we attended Russ Cohen’s lively Wild Edibles class on Saturday in Marblehead.

Cohen is an expert in foraging and has been learning and teaching about wild food for more than 35 years. He’s the author of Wild Plants I Have Known…and Eaten, available on the Essex County Greenbelt Association Web site (all proceeds go to the association). We met on Norman Street where Cohen fed us June berries he had picked in Cambridge the day before, shagbark hickory nuts (they taste like walnuts soaked in maple syrup), and fruit leather made from autumn olives.

Before we began our hike into the woods, we were given some valuable information on where to forage (wildlife management areas and organic farms are two possibilities in addition to ECGB areas), what to avoid (mushrooms, unless you’ve been trained), and how to determine how much of a plant you should take from the wild. Cohen gave us a list of edible plants in New England ranked by rarity. For example, garlic mustard is an invasive plant that you cannot harvest too much of as far as ecologists are concerned while wild leeks (ramps) should be picked more judiciously.

We spent about two hours in Steer Swamp, on the east side of Beacon Street, followed by a short walk across the tidal flats to Crowninshield Island (also known as Brown’s Island) to learn about coastal foraging opportunities.

We were astonished at the number of edible plants there are right under our noses, so to speak, and Cohen is so knowledgeable it’s impossible not to be caught up in his enthusiasm. We learned that highly invasive knotweed can be boiled like rhubarb and made into pie and that burdock root tastes a lot like artichokes. We can now identify elderberry flowers, making a mental note of the trees that will later have berries to make into juice or combine with apples into sauce or pie.

We saw just-forming grapes with leaves ready to be stuffed and rolled, sassafras (the bark makes a root-beer-like drink), Juneberry trees, jewelweed, and much, much more. On Crowninshield, we learned how to use Irish moss seaweed to make blancmange, tasted sea rocket (it has a strong horseradish flavor) and beach peas, identified a black cherry tree, and sorted out several types of edible seaweed.

If you love to learn new things about food, we highly recommend Cohen’s class. A schedule is here. If you prefer to learn on your own, the book is the best place to start, containing a huge amount of information and many recipes, some of which are here. We don’t know if we’re ready to start grinding our own flour from acorns, but those fall harvest muffins sound awfully good.

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