by By Tom Seymour
The Globe Pequot Press, 2002
A late summer day in New England brings the opportunity to relax and have fun poking through the woods or along a quiet dirt road looking for things to eat. Just the experience itself demands that you take your time and pay attention, lest you miss a small patch of chanterelles, some raspberries the birds couldn’t get to, or a perfect blob of red spruce gum to chew on while you wander along. And if you really pay attention (and have a little luck, too), you could come across the forager’s reward: a particularly tasty and uncommon item you’ve been seeking for a long time.
One of the difficulties faced by new foragers (besides timing, poor eyesight, birds, slugs, and cutthroat competition from other human foragers) is finding good field guides for edibles that focus on a particular region. Foraging New England, by Tom Seymour, seems to have solved the problem. With just a few exceptions, like the chanterelle, the book covers just about every type of wild edible found in New England, so you can bring it with you on your foraging forays as your only field guide, and then, if need be, crosscheck your bounty against other guides when you get home.
Seymour has divided the world of New England wild edibles up by the places you’ll find them: fertile streamsides, waste places, and disturbed and cultivated ground. Other chapters cover wild edibles found in many different places, such as medicinal plants, mushrooms, trees, and edible animals that would not be considered game. The result is a book that is uncommonly easy to use compared to many of the guides out there, which either require more botanical knowledge than many of us have or include too many items that aren’t found here.
Each of the 72 wild edibles in the book has at least one color plate to check your specimen against along with several detailed paragraphs of information written in a style that’s rare and elusive in guidebook: it’s fun to read. Seymour’s love for hunting wild edibles shows through in the description he has provided for each of his quarries. Even if you’ve never eaten anything that you didn’t have to unwrap, you’ll find the introduction provides all the information you will need to get started stalking wild edibles safely and successfully. And Seymour’s enthusiasm will make your mouth water with the possibilities.
Foraging New England covers some of my favorite wild edibles, including lamb’s quarters, a weed I gleefully cultivate in my garden since it has some of the best greens that ever touched a taste bud, and chicken of the woods, a mushroom that is indescribably delicious sliced, sautéed in butter, and scrambled with eggs. It covers others that I did not know were edible, most notably quickweed or galinsoga, the bane of my gardening existence. Just knowing it is edible takes a huge weight off – it now has a legitimate place in my garden. By the way, if you’d like some of it, you’re welcome to visit and pick as much as you like; in fact, take all of it. I know it will be back!