Urban foraging Find, gather, and cook 50 wild plants

Herbalist Rose (Midwest Medicinal Plants) shares in this encyclopedic outing tips for city-dwellers looking to forage edible plants. Each plant profile includes details about when and how to harvest, plus recommendations for uses. Rose covers common fare such as apples and mint, as well as lesser-known varieties, including hyssop (a "classic" cold remedy) and daylilies (which "can be stuffed with a soft cheese... then fried in butter like stuffed squash blossoms"). There's a recipe for each plant, among them mugwort bitters, autumn olive BBQ sauce, and wild garlic flatbreads. Rose cautions against searching along railroad tracks, as they're "known to be high in arsenic, which can be absorbed into plants," and advises that it's important to know what one is eating, since "poisoning is both possible and a drag," though, unfortunately, the work is light on identification tips. Seasoned gatherers will find plenty of clever tricks, though, and Rose skillfully mixes anecdotes with fast facts about everyday plants--"Japanese knotweed is at the top of nearly all invasive-plant Most Wanted lists," for example. Home cooks ready to branch out will find this a resource worth returning to. (Aug.)

The publisher and author provide a warning before this book even begins that ingesting wild plants and fungi is a risky undertaking, a point that Rose (Midwest Medicinal Plants) continues to stress in her introduction, which highlights a range of pollutants and toxins that could be on even properly identified items. With that forager-beware caveat in place, Rose offers a quick guide to botany basics, a forager's tool kit, and the legal rules of foraging. The rest of the book is devoted to the most common urban plants the very brave and deeply informed reader might pick, from apples to yarrow. Along the way there are blackberries, garlic mustard, peppermint, raspberries, and wild carrots, on top of less common choices such as ground ivy and daylily. Each entry offers a photo, brief identification and gathering information, and notes on its culinary uses; many also have recipes. VERDICT Those new to foraging will not find sufficient guidance to pick with confidence. Instead, readers will wish they could take a walk with the deeply knowledgeable Rose and learn from her in the field.--Neal Wyatt