Product Description

In his first book, Steve Brill demonstrated how to forage safely for these edible wild plants. Now, he breaks new ground by presenting more than 500 comprehensive recipes for transforming these natural foods into delicious vegetarian meals.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #252542 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 544 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Brill follows his Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (And Not So Wild) Places with this specialist volume aimed at cooking found and gathered produce. Stressing the need to forage safely and not eat any plant unless completely certain of its identification and that it's free of pesticides and herbicides, the author explains "what makes wild food special" before describing methods of preparation and food types, winemaking and the wild food seasons. Main courses and desserts are intermingled so much so that it becomes hard to tell whether the ingredient is a main component or an enhancer. Filled with humorous anecdotes and small descriptions, almost every recipe relies on at least one foraged ingredient, though where possible Brill offers health store alternatives (while Monsieur Wildman's French Dressing calls for wild spearmint, he does suggest cultivated mint; unsweetened apple juice can be substituted for wild apples in Spiced Wild Apple Cider). In the end, the book will appeal to those who enjoy foraging in the wild as well as the vegetarian who is not only health- but also environmentally conscious.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Brill, the author of an earlier field guide to wild plants, has been conducting "foraging tours" in Manhattan (including Central Park) and throughout greater New York since the mid-1980s. His new book includes dozens of recipes using wild foods, from sassafras and daylily shoots to blue violets and cow parsnips; each entry includes a brief description of the plant as well. Strict vegetarians will be delighted by Brill's recipes; nonvegetarians looking for dishes made with these unusual foods will be disappointed to find so many that call for ingredients like kudzu, lecithin, granules, liquid aminos, and the like (although there are alternatives suggested when possible). For vegetarian and other special collections.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The most seriously committed vegans forage for their own foods, taking advantage of some of nature's lesser-known but often intensely flavorful wild bounty. As "Wildman" Steve Brill points out in The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook, it takes a lot of education and plenty of experience to identify and make use of the bounty of the earth's forests and seas. Foragers must learn to distinguish not only between the toxic and the edible but also must discern which among the edible plants are actually tasty and worth harvesting and cooking. Brill offers an encyclopedia of lore and plenty of identifying botanical data for wild foods, but more pictures would help sort out these thousands of plants from one another, especially in the perilous world of fungi identification. Recipes abound, and they follow vegan principles, using everyday oils, vinegars, and other basic ingredients. Given contemporary culinary popularity of some wild foods--for instance, morels and ramps--Brill's book may well hold within its pages the first sightings of the restaurant world's next cutting-edge foods. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

good, overall
There are some fascinating recipes in here, and good information about vegetables that are usually ignored in cookbooks. Be aware, however, that this is a vegan cookbook--I personally was disappointed by this. I know that at least one recipe calls for pennyroyal, and I really don't think that using pennyroyal internally is a good idea at all.

ANOTHER GREAT BOOK!
THIS BOOK HAS SOME PRETTY NEAT RECIPES. "WILDMAN" STEVE BRILL WRITES A NICE DESCRIPTION OF EACH PLANT AND FUNGI BEFORE GIVING YOU THE RECIPES WHICH I THINK IS GREAT CONSIDERING IT'S A COOKBOOK. ALSO, THE PLANTS ARE ORGANIZED ACCORDING TO THE SEASON IN WHICH THEY ARE BEST CULTIVATED. IF YOU WANT AN EXCELLENT BOOK ON FORAGING, GET HIS Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants by Steve Brill.

A truly "must have" cookbook for anyone who loves to cook!
I'm not Euell Gibbons or Emeril, but if you were to cross those two together, it's as close as you'd be likely to come to finding someone who might be able to write a book as wonderful as "The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook" by "Wildman" Steve Brill. Wild food aficionados in particular have good reason to rejoyce, now that Mr. Brill's new cookbook is available. During the past two months, I've made nearly 20 of his recipies, and my experience has been that each one is better than the next. Fortunately, all of them seem to be easily adapted to suit available ingredients or taste preferences. Most of the sections utilizing "featured" ingredients have an interesting background about the particular plant (or in some cases, mushroom) that adds the appreciation of the dish, and the entire book is organized intelligently, in order to make cross-referencing easy. Furthermore, I've seen nothing even remotely like this book on the market today, or at any time, for that matter. Between my wife and I, we must own close to 50 cookbooks, and this is far and away our favorite. We happen to be vegetarians, but we've given the book as a gift to non-vegetarian friends on several different occasions, (As well as having entertained company using recipes from the book) and the reviews have been very favorable, to say the least.