Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThe author is a first-rate cook, or what would be called in the South a `born’ cook. He creates and improvises with authority and imagination and the results are enormously inventive. A few weeks ago he prepared at noon a dinner for six with foods he had foraged in the morning. The meal consisted of a cocktail made of wild fruit juices, batter-fried fillets of bluegill caught that morning at a nearby lake, sautéed dandelion crowns, buttered wild leeks, wild broccoli, buttered wild Jerusalem artichokes, and a persimmon-hickory nut pie. The meal was accompanied by an incredibly good salad of wild watercress, wild mint, and day lily shoots. -- Craig Claiborne, The New York Times (1962)
He knew his subject first- and second-hand; he knew it backwards to the botany of the tribes. And now he told everybody else how to gather and prepare wild food. From the Red River Valley to the mountains of Pennsylvania (where he would spend his last years) he took us all over North American to places few people knew in the way he knew them, and he showed what provender was there. He called his first book Stalking the Wild Asparagus, and it became part of the beginnings of the ecological uplift and it sold well enough to get onto the bestseller lists. -- John McPhee
