The Art of Eating In

by Cathy Erway

  In the produce aisles of grocery stores, I rarely found root vegetables that were still attached to their leaves. If you were looking for turnips, then turnip roots you would find in bins, trimmed at the stem. My first assumption was that the greens attached to these roots would not be that tasty, or even edible. But recently, I’d discovered this wasn’t always the case. It had begun with beets; their mild-tasting leaves are actually one of my favorite leafy greens to saute, much more delicate than the thick, dense leaves of kale, for instance. Biologically, beet greens are almost the same green as chard, and the beet’s deep red stems provide added nutrients that are also found in beets. I’d also tried out carrot greens in recent months, which I cooked down with swathes of other greens following a recipe for the Cajun stew gumbo z’herbes. I began wondering how many other vegetables had another edible part to them, as yet unknown to me.

  Someone else in the group eagerly accepted this burdock root, and after Tim pulled up another plant, he handed the next root to the first bidder. I didn’t get to snatch a gobo, but that was all right; by the time we had toured for an hour, I had tasted more plants than I expected I would be able to keep track of. Most of them were of the leafy-green variety, with similar looks and tastes, and to further complicate things, I hadn’t brought enough bags to properly separate them. So I decided to go easy on my gathering this first time around, gradually inaugurating my stomach to the various new plants. I already had a good handful of dandelion leaves, some cloverlike sprouts called wood sorrel, which tasted lemony and sweet, and lots of the spicy poor man’s pepper.

  With all these edible leafy greens came several red flags, though. We passed a poisonous plant called the Star of Bethlehem, which resembled the thin, cylindrical shoots of the ubiquitous wild onion and could easily be confused for it. Another common plant called the pokeweed was edible only around this time of the year, as a leafy green, but later on it would become poisonous. I thanked my lucky stars I was getting my introduction to foraging from an expert, instead of foolishly going off on my own.

  “I want to talk a little bit about the philosophy of the forager,” Tim said, once we had found a grassy spot to sit down and take a break. We had all taken a seat in a patch of shade on a hill overlooking Grand Army Plaza.

  “The difference between the forager and the consumer is about accepting what nature has to offer, rather than demanding what you want to take from it. You all know that today, you can get foods shipped in from halfway around the world at the corner store. But that isn’t what this is all about. The forager must bend with what the earth allows, and its cycles.”

  At this point, I wanted to raise my hand and ask if this wasn’t why humans had created agriculture, to grow what made the best sense for us, and not have to spend our days foraging and hunting. But as he continued to speak, with obvious passion and a unique sense of appreciation for the spontaneities of wild nature, I decided not to interrupt. Eventually, I think I got his point about foraging. It was done in defiance to the standard, and often hazardous, ways we had treated the earth in order to produce our food. It was an attempt to prove that the wild still held a bountiful harvest, and it was a celebration of that. Moreover, it was healthy (as long as you didn’t eat the Star of Bethlehem). And some people, like Tim, were living off of it for a very significant part of their diets, even in urban areas. That part was particularly enlightening. I didn’t know many other people ate from the wild, especially in densely populated places like Brooklyn, but judging from the size of my bags from a couple of hours of foraging, I figured it could easily be done.

  “Does anyone want any cookies?” Madeline said once Tim had finished his talk. “I just found them, this whole wrapped package of them, outside on my street. Somebody must have put them there; I don’t know why.” She broke the seal on a package of oatmeal raisin cookies and passed them around. I took one, shrugging. What an odd combination, though, I thought, to be eating such factory-processed food that was found on the street, and at the same time, nutritious wild food from the city.

  When I left after our tour split up, I had two plastic bags full of weeds that I hoped I would be able to tell apart from one another. At the beginning of the tour, Tim had advised that for any wild plant we were trying for the first time, to eat just a tiny taste of it the first day, then wait twenty-four hours. If nothing happened—no allergic reactions or unpleasant side effects—then it was fine to go ahead and eat more. I definitely wanted to follow this bit of wisdom. With everything jumbled together, though, I had to spend a while separating the leaves into bunches. But biting into them revealed a new strategy: I was learning to identify these plants by their taste alone, rather than by their names or appearances. With this skill, I felt like I was now becoming a foodie forager.

  But one wild edibles tour wasn’t nearly enough. I had gotten merely my first taste of Prospect Park that Saturday, and as luck had it, another foraging tour was taking place that same week. It was led by a man who had been giving wild edibles tours of New York City and its surrounding tristate area’s public parks since the 1970s. He went by the name of “Wildman” Steve Brill.

  If you search “wild edibles” in Google you’re likely to come up with Brill’s website first and foremost. So naturally, I had stumbled upon it when doing a little research before Tim’s tour. It’s a jungle of a site, filled with illustrations, folksy allusions and jokes, and plenty of photographs of the wild plants commonly found in the area, at any given time of the year. But the website on its own isn’t really meant to be a guide to eating wild edibles. Steve Brill takes dozens of beginner foragers into parks and wildlife reserves throughout the spring and summer months each year, on average more than once a week. The photos, tips, and plant profiles on Brill’s website are a great reference if you have already done a little bit of foraging first. The real experience, and the much more animated one, is Brill himself on his tour.

  That Sunday, I stood in the same spot in Grand Army Plaza, waiting for my tour guide. Because he gives tours so often, Brill asks guests to bring a suggested donation of $10 and to RSVP by phone before showing up to his tours. I did as instructed, and when I spotted a tall, gangly man in his fifties walking up to the crowd sporting beige, safari-bound khaki shorts, a tucked-in T-shirt, large glasses, and a straw hat fitted snugly over a terry cloth sweatband, I knew immediately that it was Brill. This time, the tour group of fifteen to twenty people really ran the gamut in age. There were plenty of middle-aged couples with toddlers, a few middle school kids, a handful of young adults including me, and some senior citizens.

  The toddlers were the most verbose. It had been a while since I’d last been in close proximity to a bunch of children for an extended period of time, and their constant squawking seemed exaggerated and endless. But the Wildman, the father of a toddler himself, was a natural entertainer and great with children. Corny jokes rolled out one after another, from the minute he began the tour. And the Wildman’s jaunty step and rapid-fire chatter didn’t fade at all throughout its two-and-a-half-hour course.

  One of our first stops was beside a cluster of short sprouts with small yellow clusters at their heads. The tightly bunched heads almost looked like a miniature version of a broccoli crown.

  “Hedge mustard,” the Wildman declared. Following his cue, I picked one from the ground and tasted its small, flowering head. A second after chewing it with my front teeth, a strong, spicy mustard taste spread throughout my mouth.

  “I think it tastes a little bit like Chinese hot mustard,” said the Wildman. I wasn’t sure if that was exactly the right comparison, but the weed tasted so distinctly flavorful, I couldn’t imagine why our ancestors wouldn’t have chosen it to cultivate thousands of years ago along with other mustards. I grabbed a number of these and tucked them into a plastic bag—I had remembered to take a bunch of bags this time.

  “Uh-oh, and you see those?” the Wildman said, pointing to a tall, leafy green. “This is deadly nightshade. It’s pure poison. You can tou
ch it, but whatever you do, don’t eat it.”

  On Tim’s tour, too, I had been warned of the deadly nightshade plant. We were standing right by a patch of it when he was introducing us to common plantain, and he’d pointed out how similar the two plants were in appearance. Mistakes could be fatal even if eaten in small doses.

  The Wildman now illustrated this point with a musical interlude. “If you eat this, the next thing you’ll be hearing is this—”

  He cupped his mouth into a hollow drum and clapped on his cheeks eleven times, patting out the dreadful tune they play in movies when someone has died. The children squealed in delight. Their parents snorted with laughter, none too fazed by the deadly plant. We trod on.

  Next we came across a patch of tender-looking greens with distinctly heart-shaped leaves. Here and there, small blue-violet petals decorated their slender stems.

  “These are violets,” the Wildman told us. “Violet leaves are great at this time of the year, since they’re very young. They get much thicker and tougher the longer you wait, but now they’re nice and tender. Try,” he said, and picked up a handful to pass around. Everyone bent down and began gathering the leaves.

  “You can also eat the flowers, in case you didn’t know. It makes lovely tea. Now, there’s a story about violets,” he said. And the Wildman began a drawn-out tale, told with a true storyteller’s flair: A few years ago, while taking a group on a tour of a park, he met a lady who was particularly interested in everything he said. They kept in touch afterward, and a few months later, they began to court. A full year later, once the violets had begun to sprout again in the spring, they were married. After another year, they gave birth to their beloved daughter and named her Violet, after the very plant we were eating.

  The Wildman elaborated on a lot of the plants I had seen on my foraging tour the day before, too. It was a good refresher course for so many of these common weeds. The chickweed, he pointed out, not only was an edible leafy green but made an effective poultice for rashes, or itches caused by bug bites. When its juicy stalks were split, you could rub them directly onto your skin. Even though I didn’t have any itches, I tried it out on my leg. The cooling sensation from the plant’s liquids felt refreshing. He also had some differing thoughts on some of the plants I was becoming familiar with. Dandelions, for instance, were much too bitter in his estimation to eat at this time of year. In March, the leaves were tender enough to eat raw, but now they were thicker, tougher, and more sharply bitter. He recommended cooking them at their present stage.

  “Now, does anyone know why they’re called dandelion?” he asked our group. A few guesses from the group later, he provided the rationale: “It translates to ‘tooth of the lion’ in French. Dent de lion. Because of the way the leaves are so sharply serrated.”

  One of my favorite discoveries of the day was wild garlic. Its long, slender grasses smelled strongly of onion, hinting at what lay just beneath the earth’s surface. I could remember picking these out of my front lawn as a kid as well. But what I didn’t realize then was that when these were pulled up from the earth slowly and carefully, they retained their small, bulbous roots, which were essentially small, bulbous cloves of miniature garlic. I stuffed a bunch of these into my bag. As they grew fairly rampantly year-round, I had the feeling I might never need to buy garlic again.

  We came to a small cluster of spiky brambles near the Boathouse, situated by a scenic pond in the center of the park. We had stopped there initially to break for lunch, and afterward, the Wildman had sighted a black birch tree. The actual tree, not the leaves, turned out to be the draw of this particular plant. He carefully twisted off a small twig and split it in half, so that its young, rubbery bark pulled away from the greenish wood beneath. He sucked on the twig where it had broken.

  “Now, can anyone guess what this tastes like?” Brill asked.

  A few of us followed and broke off tiny twigs from the tree. Once I put it to my mouth, I immediately sensed a very familiar taste. My first thought was chewing gum—some type of mint. Then, on further thought, I guessed it was more like root beer.

  “Sassafras!” I said aloud, naming the root that the popular drink’s flavor was modeled after.

  “Nope, it’s not sassafras,” the Wildman said.

  “Cinnamon?” someone else guessed.

  “Nope, it’s not cinnamon, either,” the Wildman said again. “Does anyone else have a guess?”

  Everyone in the group sucked thoughtfully but shook their heads.

  “It’s wintergreen. Or winter mint. It comes from this plant,” he told us. “Now, the important thing about this one is that it’s also a mild pain reliever. If you chew on the stems a little, like this”—he demonstrated, with characteristic cartoonishness—“you get a mild dose of natural pain relievers. Also, if you steep it in tea, it’s especially good for women around that time of the month.”

  A bunch of women on the tour immediately began twisting stems off the tree.

  “Since it’s a natural and safe alternative to aspirin, it’s also good for kids and babies. When Violet was teething, she used to chew on this,” the Wildman went on.

  Since I love the flavor of wintergreen, I was a little bit more excited about steeping it in tea or something else to add flavor than about trying to cure my headaches with it. Though this was good to know as well—maybe I could cure a headache with a bowl of wintergreen ice cream sometime soon.

  I had a question on my mind that I’d been trying to form the words for. I stepped up to Wildman as he was in the process of twisting a particularly toothsome branch apart, and asked him why all these plants, which were so great for eating or for other purposes, weren’t mass-grown but only found in the wild.

  “Well, because back when people decided to domesticate plants, they only picked some, and that was that, and the rest became weeds, and now we never think of them as food!” he replied. He’d shot this out so quickly, while tucking some of the birch into his fanny pack and getting ready to lead the group on down the path, that I felt like I had just asked the most obvious question in the world. His words made perfect sense, though, and at least now, the whole explanation seemed obvious.

  As we were walking along the trail away from the black birch tree, the Wildman looked more closely at a bush next to it.

  “Ah, this is a raspberry bush,” he declared. “The raspberries won’t grow until late June, though. So remember where it is—that’s easy, it’s pretty close to the Boathouse, just down the path a bit from it.” I took careful note of this on my pad.

  Just as with trash diving, there is some fine print associated with the act of foraging plants from the park. This was the subject of the Wildman’s most drawn-out yarn of the day, told with a mix of wry sarcasm and bravado. It’s against the law to “harm” the plants of New York City’s public parks, and that meant Prospect Park, Central Park, and almost all the parks where he gives walking lectures on wildlife. In 1986, an inflamed New York City Parks Department held a sting operation to smoke him out. Evidently on a mission of epic pettiness (this was during the height of New York City crime), two park rangers dressed in plain clothes attended one of Brill’s tours of Central Park, taking extensive photos and eventually calling for backup. Steve Brill was arrested, handcuffed, booked, and slapped with numerous charges. The story spread throughout all the major news channels and newspapers. NATURALIST ARRESTED FOR EATING A DANDELION, the headlines read. The parks department soon realized it had a PR disaster on its hands. But within a few weeks, they came to an agreement with Brill: They would drop the charges and allow Brill to continue giving his nature sessions in public parks under a set of sensible guidelines, mostly for the sake of the tour-goers’ safety. Since then, he’s taught hundreds of New Yorkers about the plants in their city’s backyard.

  As we were nearing the entrance to the park at Grand Army Plaza, having made a half circle of the park through winding paths, we passed a field of tulips.

  “Don’t pick those,” he said
to one toddler, who was eyeing them. “They’re not perennials, so that’s it if you take them.”

  The Wildman went on to explain that all of the plants we were harvesting that day were common perennials (meaning plants that live more than two years), able to be harvested multiple times throughout the year. They were hardy, invasive plants, a point driven home by their plentifulness. In some cases, picking them even encouraged their regrowth. Dandelion, for instance, is known for being especially well adapted to “disturbed habitats” not so kind to other plants, and for multiplying when it’s fussed with. Also, it was important to pick plants only in places where there was a large bunch of the species in that one place. That would ensure that that particular patch would continue to thrive throughout its various stages.

  Once the tour was complete, I had more than doubled the amount of wildlife that was already in my fridge. The wild garlic was one of the most useful finds of the day. I would use it in place of regular garlic throughout the month, and its thin, mild-tasting shoots were an easy substitute for fresh chives as a garnish. I concocted a simple salad of dandelion greens as soon as I got home and used garlic and the hedge mustard, minced up finely, to flavor the dressing.