Or take another example. Just up the road from my place, in the lower edge of Massachusetts, is a state park called Bartholomew’s Cobble. It is only a few acres in extent and consists primarily of a rocky upthrust bordered by the Housatonic River. The rocks there are quartzite and dolomitic marble, and the soil is ideal for ferns. In that little plot of rocks and thin topsoil is one of the finest natural collections of native wild ferns in the country. Species that can’t be found elsewhere in the East grow there. How they came there in the first place is a mystery, since there isn’t a transplant among them. But there they are, simply because that particular combination of soil and climate is ideal for ferns. It is a special biotope, a botanical island in this rocky region of weathered hills and valleys.
Broadly speaking, then, there are big areas or biotopes, such as New England, the Middle Atlantic States, the Upper Midwest, the Lower Midwest, the Lakes area, and the Southern Appalachians. Each of these big areas has its broad range of plants—and animals and birds and even insects—typical of that area. You can be reasonably sure of finding spruce and hemlock in upper New England, for instance, and white pine over most of New England and the Northeast. In New England and the upper Northeast you will find maples and birch and beech, as well as many other hardwoods. In lower New England and much of the Midwest you will find oaks, both red and white. And with these trees you will find typical undergrowth, both low trees and bushes as well as flowering plants. Blueberries are typical of oak woodland. Christmas fern and partridge-berry often grow in pine woods, and sometimes lady-slipper grows there. Birch, poplar, and wild cherry often grow in maple groves or mixed forests of hardwoods.
Within each of these big areas there are always the lesser biotopes, the distinctive environments created by local geography. There is the meadow, there is the riverbank and lake or pond shore, there is the swamp or bogland, and there is the hillside woodland. Again, there will be certain plants typical of each of these environments, as well as many plants that are common to the larger area. When I want to find black alder, our smooth-leafed northern holly, I go to the wet places, along the shore of a pond or in the margin of the bog. When I am looking for wild columbine I go up the mountainside to the sun-warmed ledges; columbine often grows elsewhere, but I know I will find it up there among the rocks. If I am looking for pussy willows, I go to the swamp. If I want to find black birch and chew its wintergreen-flavored twigs, I go to the thin woods on the mountainside.
Nature has her own patterns, her own way of organizing and establishing communities of living things. Sometimes they may seem to be untidy patterns, but I am convinced they always have logical reasons for being as they are. Any confusion is, I am sure, in me. Nature recognizes neither state lines nor regional distinctions that man may make. She is the original pragmatist, dealing with conditions as they are, abandoning experiments that do not work. When I find a plant or animal in a place that seems wrong to me, the chances are a thousand to one that I, not nature, made the wrong appraisal.
So when anyone ventures to say that such and such are the boundaries of a particular biotope, or uniform environment, that person is simply making a guess, a generalization. He is stating the probabilities. Nature herself states the facts. I doubt that I shall ever find a grove of date palms growing in my New England valley, but if I ever do I will know that I, not nature, guessed wrong.
Chapter 12
No Need To Go Hungry
The fields and forests are full of food that will sustain the starving man if he knows where to look. But most of us have our preferences in what we eat. This chapter discusses food that is there for the taking, as well as how and how not to cook it.
IN THE FIRST CHAPTER of Genesis, God is quoted as saying to Adam: “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” This is a fine, large statement on which a vegetarian can rest content. But I note that only a few pages further on the diet begins to broaden and there is a good deal of meat-eating from there on. And the anthropologists tell me that man’s dental equipment has always been that of an omnivorous creature. Apparently he ate what was at hand—plants, meat, fish, and, on occasion, insects.
Theoretically at least, a man should still be able to live on what grows around him. But both man and nature have changed, over the centuries, and the civilized appetite has rather well-defined preferences in food. With swift transportation and refrigeration, we are no longer limited to what grows in our immediate area, and canning and freezing have made Summer fruits and vegetables available the year around. Anyone with a garden, seal-top jars, and a freezer, or even with daily access to a moderately well-stocked food store, can live better today and eat more variously than any Roman emperor. But in spite of this plenty there is an urge in many country folk, especially newcomers, to partake of nature’s own bounty, the food that grows without the helping hand of man.
We live on the land, not off it, for the most part. But there are a good many edibles, some of them tasty fare indeed, to be had for the taking if one knows where and when to look for them. And, I must add, if one knows how to prepare them. The cooking, to me at least, is the critical point in the use of all wild fare.
For instance, there are wild greens. My grandmother gathered wild greens every Spring and she cooked them the way she cooked tame greens, boiling them for hours and usually with a ham bone or a chunk of salt pork “for flavor.” I never liked cooked greens, wild or tame, until my own wife began cooking them for me. She cooks them quickly and in a minimum of water. That way she makes wild mustard palatable fare, and I can even enjoy a few servings of early dandelions or young nettles. But I still revolt at some of the other traditional wildlings. Purslane, for instance, which comes out a tasteless, gelatinous mess; and dock, which is too bitter for my taste; and pokeweed, which isn’t worth the bother. Others may like them. I don’t. They are edible, though.
We always pick a few messes of dandelion greens as soon as they appear in the Spring. After they are sorted, which is a tedious job, we pour boiling water over them in a colander, to leach out the worst of the inherent bitterness. Then we cook them quickly and eat them with a dash of butter, a bit of salt and pepper, and I add a dash of vinegar. But we choose only the young leaves, and we tire of them in a week or two.
The wild cresses and mustards, and especially yellow rocket, make excellent greens if picked before they are fully budded. We choose only the tips, which makes for tedious picking but also makes better flavor. They don’t need the boiling-water treatment; we just put them in a pot with a little water, boil briefly, and season and eat. Our favorite Spring green is marsh marigold, also called cowslip. As with the cresses, we pick only the tips and take them before the buds show color. Again, a quick cooking in a minimum of water is best. And all these greens are good in a raw green salad, especially when mixed with store-bought lettuce, the only lettuce available when the wild greens are ready. They give character and taste to the practically tasteless lettuce.
I mentioned pokeweed. Those who care for it pick it very young and pour off the first water in which it is boiled. Then they cook it in a second water and eat it like spinach. The plant as it grows develops a mildly poisonous element, so it shouldn’t be eaten after it is more than six or eight inches high. But there are relatively few poisonous plants that even suggest themselves as greens, and most of them give warning in a bitter or sharply acrid taste. If they don’t taste good, don’t eat them. That is a fairly safe rule.
Very young nettles make an acceptable dish of greens, but one or two tastes satisfy me for the year. Some people say that skunk cabbage can be eaten if it is cooked in several waters and fully drained each time. It doesn’t sound worth the bother, to me, and I doubt that I could appreciate skunk cabbage no matter how it was cooked.
Then there are fern fiddleheads, which some people think are better than asparagus. The tradition is that brack
en is the best of all, but I think bracken is tough and stringy. My choice, if I must eat ferns, is the big ostrich fern, which sends up fiddleheads with stalks as big as a lead pencil. They should be cut before the fiddlehead begins to uncurl. The fuzz can be wiped off between the fingers. Then the stalks, including the curled tips, are boiled till tender in slightly salted water and treated like asparagus. They are palatable, but I prefer milkweed stalks. We even freeze milkweed, most years, to have a few packets for Winter eating. The milkweed must be gathered while very young, before the leaves have opened, while the stalks are only six or eight inches tall. Then we cook it exactly like asparagus. It becomes rank and bitter if picked too old, but when prime it is, for my money, just as good as the asparagus which doesn’t appear until the milkweed is too old to eat.
In the wild green salad of which I spoke we also use sour grass, sparingly, peppergrass, wild chickory when we can find it young, now and then a touch of clover, and often a few very young leaves of horseradish. Horseradish is not technically a wildling, but it escapes and thrives near most rural gardens. Sour dock can be added, in moderation, and lamb’s-quarters can be added. Lamb’s-quarters makes a good cooked green, by the way. I didn’t mention it earlier because it doesn’t grow in profusion in my area. Actually, the wild-greens salad is more of a stunt than a stand-by. We make one almost every Spring, just to prove that we can do it, but it takes half the morning to gather the greens we want, and that at a season when we should spend the time planting the vegetable garden.
Of wild roots, there aren’t many that are really palatable or worth the work. Jerusalem artichokes are treasured by some people. These plants are really sunflowers, with no relation either to Jerusalem or the artichoke, but they produce knotty roots that are edible, Spring and Fall. We find them a satisfactory substitute for water chestnuts in Chinese food. We also sometimes boil them and eat them with Hollandaise sauce. But they are small and hard to peel. They are sometimes called Indian potatoes, and I assume that the Indians roasted and ate them. I understand that the Indians also roasted and ate the fat root of the Jack-in-the-pulpit, which is sometimes called Indian turnip. Raw or even partially cooked, that root is fiery hot to the taste. The Indians can have it, as far as I go. Groundnuts, which belong to the same family as clover and peanuts, also have edible roots which, when boiled, taste something like turnips. But for the turnip flavor I prefer turnips, which are more easily dug and much more easily peeled.
Real nuts are in another category. Hickory nuts, walnuts, butternuts, pecans, hazelnuts—they are all good fare. And if one lives in or visits the Southwest, I would definitely add piñon nuts, tedious though they are to gather and to shell. Squirrels also know the virtue of wild nuts, however, and there is always the question of who will harvest first, you or the squirrels. If the squirrels get first chance, those that are left for you will be the culls. Although there is a good deal of hazel brush on my place, I have yet to pick a quart of ripe hazelnuts for myself. The only way I can beat the squirrels to them is to gather the nuts still green and hope they ripen on the stem in my woodshed. Even then, the squirrels get half of them, since the squirrels get into the woodshed.
Some acorns are edible, chiefly those of the white oaks. The Indians are said to have eaten quantities of them, even to have made a kind of bread out of acorn meal. I’ve never gone that far. But a white-oak acorn sometimes tastes to me like a chestnut tinged with tannic acid, just enough to pucker my mouth a little. I have roasted them and found them moderately tasty, after the first one or two had accustomed my mouth to the flavor. But the acorns from the red oaks all are bitter, heavily tinged with tannic acid. The Indians gathered both kinds, white and red, leached them with water after the nuts had been ground into meal. I have heard of white folk using acorn meal, leached under running water, to make muffins, using a corn-muffin recipe, but I have never tasted them. If you like the unusual, you might try it.
When it comes to fruit and berries, you will find a wealth of them in nearly any woodland, brush patch, or old meadow. Wild strawberries are classic gourmet fare. Once or twice we have made wild-strawberry jam, which is very special; but we prefer to eat them as they come from the vine, sun-warm, or to have a handful in cream at breakfast time. Occasionally we mix them with tame berries in the breakfast bowl. And always wish we hadn’t because the wild ones make the tame ones taste flat and flavorless.
Wild raspberries are also special with us. If you have the red ones in your area, appreciate them. Ours are mostly the small black-caps, but we pick all we can find and eat them raw or freeze them for a special treat in Midwinter. We have made jam from them and jelly; but the jam is rather seedy. The red ones make better jam but not as good jelly as the black-caps. A mixture of the two makes excellent jam.
Wild blackberries are perfect in any form, raw in milk or cream, in jam or jelly, or frozen. Raspberries and blackberries grow on country roadsides, in the edge of the woods, and in fence rows.
Blueberries and huckleberries are traditional New England fare but I have never acquired a taste for them. I eat my blueberries as I pick them, in the open, and a few handfuls satisfy me. But that is a personal matter. Look for blueberries in oak woods or on high hillsides where there once were groves of oaks. They like acid soil and seldom grow in broad-leaf woodlands except where oaks predominate.
Chokecherries make excellent jelly with a special tang, but the birds love them and usually force us to pick ours before they are fully ripe. I always find the best chokecherries near a bog or other wetland. Elderberries present the same problem as chokecherries—the birds beat us to them. But we usually get our share, enough for jelly. Some people make elderberry pie, which is quite a chore. And the result reminds me of blueberry pie. Elderberries also prefer damp soil near bogs or along stream banks. Look for them there.
Among the lesser berries are those of the pimbina or “high-bush cranberry.” We have made jelly from them as well as sauce, both of which have much the same flavor as true cranberries. Real cranberries also grow wild throughout the Northeast. You will find them in lowland bogs, and you will have to wear boots to gather them. And among the thornless bush berries are a number of viburnum fruits that are edible. You might try nannyberry, or wild raisin, whose fresh fruit is rather insipid but tastes much like commercial raisins when it shrivels in late Fall. Shadblow or serviceberry has a mild, sweet-flavored fruit with a texture like a mellow, juicy apple. But the birds and squirrels usually beat me to them, in my woods. They also grow in moist soil, near streams, usually.
All roses, since they belong to the same family as the apple, have edible seed pods or hips. They have a rather sharp tang, and I am told that they are full of vitamin C. I pluck them occasionally in September, when they are apple-red, and suck their juice; and once we gathered a quart of ripe hips from the wild roses along the pasture line, crushed them, stewed them, strained out the juice, and made a couple of glasses of jelly. It looked like apple jelly, and it had a fine, sharp, wild tang. But the job of making the jelly is tedious, and there aren’t enough wild roses around to provide many hips.
The wild grapes are really our stand-by for wild jelly. They grow in the woods and at the roadside all over my area. There is even a tangle of them on one section of the garden fence which about one year in three bears heavily. They happen to be the tiny river grapes, only about a quarter of an inch in diameter, but they make superior jelly. We pick them by the bunch, wash them, sort out the twigs and leaves and stems, simmer them, crush them, set them to drain in a jelly bag, and make wild grape jelly every year. One year when the wild crop was short I mixed them, about half and half, with domestic Concords, but the result was a compromise, good enough but not the real wild grape. We’ve never adulterated them since.
On my mountainside there is a small grove of wild plum trees. I don’t know where they came from, but they are beautiful in May, when in full bloom, and they bear plums about the size of my thumb-end. When those plums ripen to a ruddy red, early in
September, I pick a few pecks of them and we make jam. It is one of the best of all jams, we think, especially with roasts and particularly with venison. The jam process takes time, since we slit each plum, take out the seed, and save both the seeds and the pitted plums. We cook seeds and plums separately, then add the juice from the seeds to the simmering pulp and throw the seeds away. This way we save the flavor of the pulp that has clung to the seeds. Then we add about one cup of sugar to each two cups of pulp and simmer pulp, skins, and juice until the skins are tender and the color has deepened. It takes hours, but when the mixture has reached the right point for jam we pour it into jelly glasses, seal it, and stow it away. This is one tedious job well worth the bother.
There are also edible wild mushrooms, quite a number of them. But unless one knows which are which among the mushrooms, it is downright stupid to eat them. Some are mildly poisonous, some are deadly poisonous. We pick and eat morels and puffballs, which are quite easy to recognize; but I wouldn’t even attempt to describe them because there are poisonous mushrooms that somewhat resemble both of them. If you want to eat wild mushrooms, study micology, learn which are which. There are about two dozen poisonous forms, many of which are quite common and several of which resemble edible species.
Some of the bracket fungi which grow on dead or dying trees are also edible, but again the same warning holds—unless you know which are which, don’t eat them. It is my experience that even the edible bracket fungi are rather tasteless and usually tough. All the fungi, whether edible or poisonous, are interesting to study as forms of plant life. But only the expert, or at least the well informed, should eat those which grow wild.