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Cover image of The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants
Cover image of The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants
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The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants

Easy to Pick, Easy to Prepare

Lytton John Musselman and Harold J. Wiggins
Publication Date
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Field-to-table cuisine! Connect with (and eat) the diverse flora around us.

A recent rise in the popularity of urban farming, farmers’ markets, and foraging from nature means more people are looking for information about plants. In The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants, botanists Lytton John Musselman and Harold J. Wiggins coach you on how to safely identify, gather, and prepare delicious dishes from readily available plants—and clearly indicate which ones to avoid.

More than 200 color illustrations, accompanied by detailed descriptions, will help you recognize edible plants such as nettles...

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Field-to-table cuisine! Connect with (and eat) the diverse flora around us.

A recent rise in the popularity of urban farming, farmers’ markets, and foraging from nature means more people are looking for information about plants. In The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants, botanists Lytton John Musselman and Harold J. Wiggins coach you on how to safely identify, gather, and prepare delicious dishes from readily available plants—and clearly indicate which ones to avoid.

More than 200 color illustrations, accompanied by detailed descriptions, will help you recognize edible plants such as nettles, daylilies, river oats, and tearthumbs. For decades, Musselman and Wiggins have taught courses on how to prepare local plants, and their field-to-table recipes require only a few, easily found ingredients. They offer instructions for making garlic powder out of field garlic and turning acorns into flour for Rappahannock Acorn Cakes. To toast your new skill, they even include recipes for cordials.

The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants is a great gift for the beginning naturalist and the perfect addition to every serious forager’s library.

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Reviews

The book is witty and full of commonsense. It is a jolly good read for anyone.

— Portland Book Review

Whether this is your passion or merely something you might be interested in learning about, check out The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants... Should I ever get a craving for stinging nettle omelet or black locust fritters, I will know exactly which wild edible plant book to look in.

— Aiken Standard

Dr. Musselman is a passionate botanist. Walking among plant life makes him very happy, which means he is happy most of the time, except when riding in a car stuck in a long tunnel. He will stop people on the street to tell them some great news from the plant world.

— Garrison Keillor

Drawing from a lifetime of foraging experience, Musselman and Wiggins expand the reader's food gathering repertoire with simple recipes and a fascinating assortment of plants largely overlooked by the wild food literature.

— Samuel Thayer, author of The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants
About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
5.5
x
8.5
Pages
144
ISBN
9781421424293
DOI
Illustration Description
116 color photos
Subject
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
Wild Plants as Food
Before You Begin
Emergency Food
How to Use This Book
Guidelines for Using the Recipes.
About Flavorings, Sweeteners, and Oils
Beverages
Recipes for Failure
2

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Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
Wild Plants as Food
Before You Begin
Emergency Food
How to Use This Book
Guidelines for Using the Recipes.
About Flavorings, Sweeteners, and Oils
Beverages
Recipes for Failure
2. Deadly Harvest
Poison Ivy, Poison Oak, Poison Sumac
Poison Hemlock
Mushrooms
3. Nature's Storehouse of Edible Plants
4. Condiments
Sassafras
Field Garlic
5. Aperitifs
Swamp Bay
Red Spruce
6. Greens
Chicory
Curly Dock
Glasswort
Kudzu
Stinging Nettle
Black Walnut
7. Starches
American Lotus
Arrowhead
Groundnut
Nut Sedge
Oaks
Softstem Bulrush
Spring Beauty
8. Grains and Plants Used Like Grains
Cane
Manna Grass
River Oats
Yellow Pond Lily
9. Flowers
Black Locust
Cattails
Orange Day Lily
Redbud
10. Sweets
Indian Strawberry
Pawpaw
11. Cordials
Blueberries
12. Mushrooms
Oyster Mushroom
Chicken of the Woods
Puffballs
Index of Recipes

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Author Bios
Lytton John Musselman
Featured Contributor

Lytton John Musselman

Lytton John Musselman is the Mary Payne Hogan Professor of Botany and manager of the Blackwater Ecologic Preserve at Old Dominion University. He is author of A Dictionary of Bible Plants and Figs, Dates, Laurel, and Myrrh: Plants of the Bible and the Quran.
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Featured Contributor

Harold J. Wiggins

Harold J. Wiggins is a wetlands ecologist and environmental scientist who spent over 24 years with the Regulatory Program, US Army Corps of Engineers. He is the cofounder of the Fredericksburg chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society and the author of Virginia Native Plants.
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