Customer Reviews

The Wild Table: Seasonal Foraged Food and Recipes

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I have always wanted to learn to cook but have pretty much limited myself to leafing through cookbooks and enjoying other people's cooking. That is, until my wife brought home THE WILD TABLE by Connie Green and Sarah Scott. I can't put it down; the photos are magnificent, the recipes are ingenious and innovative and, most of all, the writing is is both humorous and intelligent. The stories about the food that's featured are really interesting and just when I thought I had read most everything about food and food preparation I have found out that there are no horizons to the culinary experience. Reading THE WILD TABLE has prompted me to redouble my efforts at being a good cook.

I can't recommend the book highly enough. It should be in everyone's culinary library.

I am the chef for the Sonoma County Mushroom Association, did the same for the Mycological Society of San Francisco years ago, was the foray chef for David Arora, and I know how to cook mushrooms and other wild foods. But in this fabulous collection of essays, recipes, and fine photographs I learned new stuff too. Connie's accounts of her forays and foods and Sarah's kitchen expertise make fine pairings worthy of sitting this book on shelves amongst any James Beard book award winners I've enjoyed the pleasures of reading and owning.
Patrick Hamilton

I just got my copy of The Wild Table, and the recipes look fabulous. As a mushroom hunter I'm always looking for new ways to prepare wild mushrooms. The spruce tip infused vodka sounds very interesting. Connie Green's passion for foraging comes through in her writing and her stories of introducing wild food to the Bay Area food community are very engaging.

I'm a decent home cook, both savory and pastry. We have a garden and I pickle and can. Still, my interest in food and cooking is greater than my skills, patience, and budget--I wish I could afford a micro-gram scale, and a vacuum chamber, etc. I drool and giggle over Blumenthal, Keller, and Achatz's books, but in truth, I've only made a couple of things from these wonderful, inventive books.

When I saw The Wild Table at the bookstore, on a 20 below zero Minnesota day, I bought it on a whim. The photography was so luscious and the writing so delightful I bought it, thinking I'd probably never cook anything from it, but that it would be a cheap winter vacation.

Well, it WAS a mid-winter vacation, but it also was useful and delicious cookbook. True, the only wild foods around here in winter are ice and snow, but, I found it was easy to substitute ingredients and make "wild tables" in the mid-western mid-winter. The recipes were rock solid and the instructions clear. Of course I'm sure everything would taste better with fresh ingredients gathered from the wild, but it's pretty darn good with dried ingredients and things gathered from the local co-op.

While I doubt I'll be gathering wild foods even when the weather turns, I will be using this book. What I can gather in the stores around Minneapolis is enough to keep me going. This is a beautiful, delightful, and useful book. If you've got a decent co-op nearby, you'll love it.

I LOVE this book even though I'm not a great cook and don't like mushrooms. The stories with each recipe are like reading a novel. I now know more about mushrooms than I could hope for. This is a great coffee table book because it inspires conversation. The alternate ingredients make the dishes workable no matter where one lives. I'm tempted to try some of the simple receipes - minus the mushrooms of course.

Way to go Connie!

Before I have this book, I had been intimidated foraging in the wild; my limited knowledge had made my foraging uneventful. Now, my wild foraging have been exciting.
The book's anecdote about each edible wild featured offers a bunch of helpful information. The "kitchen notes" gives ideas how to handle whatever was foraged. The recipes do not intimidate; they are easy to follow, and really tasty.
Thank you Connie and thank you Sarah for sharing your expertise.

I am an experienced forager. I am also a big time foodie. If that describes you...or you want for it to...then this book is for you. This is such a beautiful book...I like to thumb through it just to look at the incredible photos of mouth watering foods. It helps you to know what to do with the bounty to be found in the great outdoors...and excites you to take those ingredients to the next level of tastiness! Excellent.

This book is so wonderfully written with amazing photographs and recipes from some of the bay area's top chefs. The grilled cheese and huckleberry lemon dessert can't be missed!

This is such a fantastic book. I was surprised at how large it is. Not only are there great recipes provided from classically trained chefs helping you to utilize the abundance of wild foods around us, but there is an in-depth explanation on how to forage, harvest and prepare these wild foods for consumption. I have a deep passion for wild crafting, food foraging and everything wild, this book is one of my favorite 'wild' books. I hope she writes a second, expanding on the offerings nature provides including some recipes using Acorn :)

Connie Green and Sarah Scott's The Wild Table: Seasonal foraged food and recipes is the latest in a string of books capitalizing on the foraged (also called wild crafted) food movement. Just as the movement has evolved and matured, Green & Scott's book is a step above all others.

While in America the "foraged" ingredient restaurant craze is exploding, the concept has been around as long as restaurants have existed in the rest of the world. The country most known for such food would certainly be Italy, which developed the Slow Foods movement, but slow food is not necessarily about wild, foraged foods. France certainly could argue its place in history, but so could many other countries full of chefs who head out on a crisp Autumn morn to gather the day's new bolets. Although this is a new fad on the American restaurant scene, the practice is obviously not new.

Author of The Wild Table, Connie Green launched her career as a wild food provider to restaurants in the late 70s when she was regularly turned away by chefs driven by convenient restaurant suppliers. The idea of not knowing what ingredients would be available for a menu was not attractive to chefs at the time. But soon chefs realized the value of freshness, and in particular the power of freshness over reliability or convenience. The tides began to turn.

In her book, Green recounts those early days and how at some point she ended up at the back door of a fledgling restaurant named The French Laundry. Keller bought her concept and the two have maintained a mutually beneficial and thriving relationship ever since. Keller provides his reflections in the introduction to the book.

To explain my very personal interest as a reviewer, my own restaurant has taken unexpected routes which have ultimately led me to foraged foods. I started with a local foods menu, but quickly questioned the value of such ingredients when they were being raised out of season in greenhouses. The toned down flavors simply didn't partner well with the expanded availability. That led me to then explore the historic diets of our indigenous Apache people who survived for centuries without restaurant suppliers. Bison, acorn, wild grapes, cattails... the bounty was there, but the flavors seemed limiting. As I delved deeper it seemed surely there was more to their diet and we simply didn't have record of it, so I mentored under a man who has lived in our local woods for nearly a decade. Now the natural pantry doors have been flung wide open, and on any given night my menu will feature no less than 20 foraged ingredients.

While my vision has become clear, the faddishness of foraging in America has led to questionable practices by many chefs. This brings me to The Wild Table, in the hope that a book can finally act as a contemporary authoritative voice that can provide 1) experienced guidance, 2) practical knowledge, and 3) good recipes.

The Wild Table (2010, 368 pages) starts with Green's introduction, which is a fun trip down memory lane. I'm sure she had no idea what her relationship with The French Laundry meant back at that first basket of mushrooms, and now looks back with giggles and nostalgia. The book explores the fundamentals and etiquette of foraging -- there are many other, stronger sources for etiquette and ethics, but for a home cook Green offers a nice primer. Next the authors jump into over 100 recipes, most of which co-author Sarah Scott has created, broken down by seasons of the year. Spring brings us spruce, nettles and elderflowers. Summer abounds in mushrooms, fennel, and berries. "Indian Summer" offers more mushrooms, cuitlachoche, and rose hips. Autumn shows still more mushrooms, juniper berries and black walnuts. And finally winter displays a few straggling mushrooms, dandelions and prickly pear fruit. The book wraps up with a good description of a foraged pantry, a North American calendar of when each item can be found and a very limited list of resources.

The book is certainly more geared toward the home cook with a passion for the outdoors. It is ideal for readers living in California or the Pacific Northwest (or perhaps other regions around the world with similar climates.) For me in the desert Southwest of the USA, I found the specific ingredients not very helpful since most don't exist for hundreds of miles, but the recipes are well written and accessible, and the photography gorgeous, making for enjoyable browsing.

The Wild Table left my personal journey unfinished. It's a nice read, but isn't as applicable to my professional needs as I would have liked. I will continue to look for a book that offers a strong directive on foraging etiquette and ethics, and that offers a more universal canvassing of ingredients. Maybe that can be found in 2011's Hunt, Gather, Cook by Hank Shaw, the latest book on the topic, which I'll be reviewing soon.