Forage, Harvest, Feast: A Wild-Inspired Cuisine by Marie Viljoen

In this groundbreaking collection, celebrated New York City forager, cook, kitchen gardener, and writer Marie Viljoen incorporates wild ingredients into everyday menus and special occasion fare. Motivated by a hunger for new flavors and working with thirty-six versatile wild plants―some increasingly found in farmers markets―she offers deliciously compelling recipes, including variations on

• Cocktails
• Snacks & Appetizers
• Entrées
• Desserts
• Breads
• Preserves, Sauces and Syrups
• Ferments, spices, and salts

From underexplored native flavors like bayberry and spicebush to accessible ecological threats like Japanese knotweed and mugwort, Viljoen presents hundreds of recipes unprecedented in scope. They range from simple quickweed griddle cakes with American burnweed butter to sophisticated dishes like a souffléed tomato roulade stuffed with garlic mustard, or scallops seared with sweet white clover, cattail pollen, and sweetfern butter. Viljoen makes unfamiliar ingredients familiar by treating each to a thorough culinary examination, allowing readers to grasp every plant's character and inflection.

Forage, Harvest, Feast―featuring hundreds of color photographs as well as cultivation tips for plants easily grown at home―is destined to become a standard reference for any cook wanting to transform wildcrafted ingredients into exceptional dishes, spices, and drinks.

Eating wild food, Viljoen reminds us, is a radical act of remembering and honoring our shared heritage. Led by a quest for exceptional flavor and ecologically sound harvesting, she tames the feral kitchen, making it recognizable and welcoming to regular cooks.

Marie Viljoen is a writer, forager, gardener, and cook, and has loved edible plants since her childhood in South Africa. The author of 66 Square Feet, her urban and edible gardens have been profiled by The New York Times and Martha Stewart Living and appear in several books. She is the resident forage expert for Edible Brooklyn and Edible Manhattan magazines and a contributor to Gardenista. Her stories and photographs appear in Saveur, Better Homes and Gardens, and many other publications. Marie leads sought-after seasonal wild plant walks in New York City, where she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Vincent Mounier. Find her daily projects on Instagram @66squarefeet.