Forage: Wild Plants to Gather and Eat by Liz Knight, iluustrated by Rachel Pedder-Smith [Laurence King Publishing]
There’s a whole world of edible plants growing around us, but if the closest you’ve ever been to foraging for food is scrumping apples (or more recently, scrabbling at the red-stickered items in your supermarket’s Reduced section), you need this beautiful book. Although the publishers say ‘Anybody can enjoy the increasingly popular back-to-nature activity of foraging’, the truth is, very few of us feel confident enough to start picking some of the foliage we see on our daily walks. Thanks to Liz’s clear descriptions, and the stunning botanical illustrations of Rachel Pedder-Smith, the identification is made far easier and reading this, you’ll really feel encouraged to explore and diversify with wild ingredients. What’s more, it’ll certainly make you look at flowers in a different way – from pickled cherry blossoms, linden leaf madeleines, dandelion petal cake to damson and rose petal preserves, the accompanying recipes sound like a feast for all the senses.
Nowadays we’re perhaps becoming used to seeing ‘foraged food’ celebrated on menus of fine dining restaurants, but really Liz wants everyone to feel confident enough to try their hand at picking ingredients growing wild locally. Nowadays, Liz’s life is spent searching the local hedgerows in search of scrumptious finds, and we’re sure that reading this book will sew some more seeds of the passion for foraging and let them bloom.
*****
Available at Waterstones
