Forage, Harvest, Feast A Wild-Inspired Cuisine by Marie Viljoen

Hardcover

In this groundbreaking collection, celebrated New York City forager, cook, kitchen gardener, and writer Marie Viljoen incorporates wild ingredients into everyday menus and special occasion fare. Motivated by a hunger for new flavors and working with thirty-six versatile wild plants, some increasingly found in farmers markets. She offers deliciously compelling recipes, including variations on

• Cocktails
• Snacks Appetizers
• Entres
• Desserts
• Breads
• Preserves, Sauces and Syrups
• Ferments, spices, and salts

From underexplored native flavors like bayberry and spicebush to accessible ecological threats like Japanese knotweed and mugwort, Viljoen presents hundreds of recipes unprecedented in scope. They range from simple quickweed griddle cakes with American burnweed butter to sophisticated dishes like a souffled tomato roulade stuffed with garlic mustard, or scallops seared with sweet white clover, cattail pollen, and sweetfern butter. Viljoen makes unfamiliar ingredients familiar by treating each to a thorough culinary examination, allowing readers to grasp every plants character and inflection.

Forage, Harvest, Feast, featuring hundreds of color photographs as well as cultivation tips for plants easily grown at home is destined to become a standard reference for any cook wanting to transform wildcrafted ingredients into exceptional dishes, spices, and drinks.

Eating wild food, Viljoen reminds us, is a radical act of remembering and honoring our shared heritage. Led by a quest for exceptional flavor and ecologically sound harvesting, she tames the feral kitchen, making it recognizable and welcoming to regular cooks.

The photos are beautiful, and most of the recipes are simple enough that you don’t need a culinary degree to follow them, but at the same time they ooze creativity. Its not just a book of recipes, its a celebration of local flavors. You can feel the love on every page. There are no other books like it–an amazing source of inspiration and a must-have for anyone remotely interested in wild edibles.