Book Board Chat

The Food at Our Feet … A Forager’s Diary

I spent the summer foraging. The pursuit of wild food has become fashionable.

JUNE

I began working my way north as soon as I arrived in Italy. I unpacked a carton of books with titles like “Nature’s Garden” and “The Wild Table.” I bought new mud boots and enlisted a mentor, John Paterson, who looked at my boots and said, “What’s wrong with sneakers?” Paterson is the kind of spontaneous forager who carries knives and old shopping bags and plastic buckets in the trunk of his car. (I carry epinephrine and bug repellent.) Being lanky and very tall, he can also leap over scraggly brush, which I, being small, cannot. Paterson got his start foraging as a schoolboy. Today, he has a Romanian wife, two children, and a thriving restaurant of his own—the Antica Osteria della Valle—in Todi. In early June, I was finishing a plate of Paterson’s excellent tagliarini with porcini when he emerged from the kitchen, pulled up a chair, and started talking about the mushrooms he had discovered, foraging as a boy.

A week later, we set out for some of his favorite foraging spots. We stopped at the best roadside for gathering the tiny leaves of wild mint (“Fantastic with lamb”) and passed the supermarket at the edge of town, where only the day before he’d been cutting wild asparagus behind the parking lot (“Great in risotto, but it looks like I took it all”). Then we tried the field where he usually gets his wild fennel (“The flowers are lovely with ham and pork”) and found much of that delicious weed. I was hoping to find strioli, too. Strioli is a spicy wild herb that looks like long leaves of tarragon. It grows in fields and pastures in late spring and early summer and makes a delicious spaghetti sauce—you take a few big handfuls of the herb, toss it into a sauté pan with olive oil, garlic, and peperoncini, and in a minute it’s ready.

One tumbledown house spoke to Paterson. He jumped out of the car, peered over a thicket of roadside bush and sloe trees, and disappeared down a steep, very wet slope before I had even unbuckled my seat belt. Tthe wild asparagus, which usually hides from the sun in a profusion of other plants’ leaves and stalks, was so plentiful that you couldn’t miss it. We filled a shopping bag. Paterson had spotted a patch of leafy scrub and pulled me toward it. He called it crespina. It’s a spiny sow thistle—a peppery wild vegetable whose leaves taste a little like spinach and a lot like sorrel. Free food! There’s nothing like it. It always tastes better.”

That is the sample start of a seven page article with July, August and September to go. You are welcome to read more because “Most of us eat only what we know. It’s time to put on your boots (or our sneakers) and look around.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/21/111121fa_fact_kramer?currentPage=all