Stalking the Wild Asparagus, By Laura Silverman, Best Made Guide to Food & Foraging
Those of you old enough to have watched television in the ‘70s may remember the author of a book by that name—Euell Gibbons, who claimed that Grape Nuts tasted “just like wild hickory nuts.” As a teen during the Depression, Euell helped provide for his family by gathering wild edibles in the Texas dustbowl. He went on to become a legendary forager and an idol of mine (his affiliation with Post, notwithstanding). This week I ventured out into woods and dales on a quest for the season’s first signs of food upstate where I live in Sullivan County: morels, ramps, asparagus and fiddleheads. To say I was unlucky wouldn’t be overstating it. Nary a wild leek, stalk, shroom nor ostrich fern did I encounter. But I did come across lots of stinging nettles, which make for a delicious, vibrant green soup, and plenty of garlic mustard, a rather pungent native plant that lends its bracing flavor to salads and pestos. In vain I scoured the grounds of an old apple orchard, a favorite spot for morels, so eager was I to use my new Opinel knife. Curved like a scimitar and light in the hand, it’s the perfect tool for foraging expeditions. My only discovery was a beautiful, bulbous puffball whose gorgeous metallic luster, almost like bronze, helped me identify it as Bovista plumbea, a tumbling puffball. As fate would have it, a later stroll around my own back yard turned up some voluptuous examples of what are commonly known as “false morels,” “beefsteak morels” or “brain mushrooms.” Commonly found under conifers, they owe their colloquial names to the intricately wrinkled and folded caps that actually look more like a big turd than any morel I’ve ever seen. Although these gyromitra esculenta are glorious specimens, they are also, unfortunately, wildly poisonous. I did not eat them, and thus will live to forage another day.
Laura Silverman is the Best Made Guide to Food and Foraging, she lives in Sullivan County New York and is the author of our favorite blog, Glutton For Life.
