Plants played a principal role in the diets of Native Americans and Canadian First Peoples when Columbus rediscovered the New World. They regularly supplemented meat and fish with wild fruits, nuts, roots, tubers, greens, seeds, beverages, and the like, which were gathered from the land around them. Indeed, their health was so much improved by this food over the European diet that native peoples of the New World are often described as being much taller than the explorers journaling about them. And, in many cases, the original inhabitants specifically manipulated the landscape to increase the growth of the most beneficial of these plants. We can still have the satisfaction of doing that today.
You needn’t be any kind of an expert, even in this day of space travel and atomic power, to begin eating wild foods, unspoiled and free. If you will positively identify everything before you gather it—made easy by this field guide with its detailed descriptions and its illustrations in full color—you will never have any trouble. In particular, this guide groups species together that are closely related and used the same way. It is unique in its breadth of coverage of more than 150 species across North America, from the swamps of Florida to the tundra of the North Slope.
Wild foods have long been important on this young continent. Acorns probably rated the top position on the long list of edible wild vegetation depended on by Native Americans, acorn soup or mush being the chief daily food of more than three-fourths of the native Californians. When Cortez and his conquistadors advanced through the dry, open Southwest, they found the peoples of that region using the tiny brown, gray, and white seeds of the chia for food, a teaspoon being regarded as sufficient to maintain a warrior for a day on a forced march.
Native peoples of the Americas have long used the seeds of the lamb’s quarter, 75,000 of which have been counted on a single plant, for cereal and for grinding into meal. Although the purslane that today grows wild from coast to coast does not become quite so large (52,300 seeds have been found on a single plant), the tribes of the American Southwest used these for making bread and mush. They also made a nutritious meal from the roasted seeds of the shepherd’s purse. Incidentally, the green leaves of all three of these plants are delectable.
If you’ve ever sat down to a well-prepared meal that included wild vegetables, maybe you’ve noticed that many of them seemed to taste better than domesticated varieties from the store. I’ll let you in on a trade secret: they are better.
Green leafy vegetables, to give just one example, deteriorate very rapidly. Even when purchased as fresh as possible from the finest nearby supermarket, they’ve already lost a sizeable portion of their vitamins. Some of the food values of greens diminish as much as one-third during the first hour after picking. But gather them fresh from nature’s own garden and eat them while they’re at their tastiest, and you’ll enjoy the best they have to offer.
When the Forty-Niners stampeded up California’s streams and into the deserts and mountains for gold, a lack of market produce and their agnosticism of nature’s bounty brought crippling and killing scurvy to many of the camps. The natives helped some of these argonauts cure the vitamin-deficiency disease by introducing them to the succulencies of miner’s lettuce. The more than a dozen species of dock plants thriving on this continent from the Arctic Coast southward throughout the United States provide hearty greens that were widely eaten by the natives, some of whom also used the abundant seeds by grinding them into meal.
Native Americans used the slippery elm bark for food, sometimes boiling it with tallow they rendered from buffalo fat. They used to preserve serviceberries by drying them by the thousands of bushels, spreading them in the sun, and later beating them into a mash that was molded into cakes and dried like fruit leather. Mulberries, which can be gathered by the gallon just by shaking a heavily laden branch over an outspread cloth, were also a staple.
Instead of potatoes, carrots, radishes, parsnips, beets, and turnips as we know them, natives often relied on wild roots and tubers, especially in those parts of the arid West where lack of rainfall made any vegetable raising virtually impossible. When pioneers, prospectors, and others later began daring the plains and deserts, many of them starved to death amid abundance because they didn’t know what to eat or how to prepare it.
The prairie turnip, for example, was a mainstay of such tribes as the Sioux. Tribes from the Atlantic to the Pacific ate the potato-like roots of the arrowhead, usually either boiling them or roasting them in the hot ashes. Jerusalem artichokes—distinctively flavored tubers of a native sunflower—were also relished. Tribes along the eastern seaboard relied on the potato-like groundnut. After the tribes showed these groundnuts to the Pilgrims, the latter relied on them heavily to survive their first winter at Plymouth.
Wild onions, including the leeks, chives, and garlics, grow wild all over North America except in the far northern regions. Natives used them extensively, not only for the provocative taste they impart to blander foods, but also as a main part of the meal. Some tribes used wild ginger roots as seasoning. Many peoples also relied on the dried and powdered root of the jack-in-the-pulpit for flour.
The picturesque cattails, now too often shunned as a weed, were a veritable smorgasbord, providing important foodstuffs in every season of the year. Two varieties of wild rice were so important that the last treaty signed between two warring tribes in the United States, the Sioux and the Ojibway, involved a disputed ricing territory in Wisconsin. Walnuts, butternuts, hazelnuts, beechnuts, and especially hickory nuts were eaten in great quantities by native peoples. The piñon and its cousins, such as the Parry pine and the digger pine, have long been important foods to the tribes of the Southwest.
Spearmint, Oswego tea, wild bergamot, spicebush, sweet fern, Labrador tea, sassafras, sumac, birch, pine, and spruce all made exceptional teas helping both to purify the water and to prevent scurvy. When the settlers pushed west, the wise ones followed the native peoples’ lead in this area. If these plants had not been rich in water-soluble vitamin C, many of the early pioneers would not have lived long enough to explore anything.
When it comes to the maple, even the seeds are edible, some tribes formerly hulling and boiling the larger of them. The various species of broad-leaved, tendril-climbing, or trailing wild grapes were used throughout the continent. The Seneca were among the peoples who roasted sunflower seeds—after the highly nutritious kernels had been extracted—and then poured hot water over them to make a coffeelike beverage.
Wild plum and nanny berries were great favorites among the native peoples. A few tribes used to dry and grind juniper berries and use them for cakes and mush. Both the natives and the early settlers dried barberries for winter use, making an agreeable cooling drink from them, and turning much of the rest into pleasantly tart sauces. Natives used to devour tremendous quantities of buffalo berries, gathering them by the bushel and often making a pudding out of them with the aforementioned prairie turnip.
Milkweed, growing from coast to coast, was long used. Native Americans found pokeweed, one of the first greens growing in the spring throughout the lands of the Delaware, delicious. Some of the first Europeans on these shores agreed so much that they took the seeds back to France and southern Europe where pokeweed became quite popular as a vegetable.
Today, gourmets, campers, and stay-at-home cooks alike will find pleasure in harvesting their meals from the wild lands where nature is the farmer and nothing is ever due at the checkout counter. It is my hope that you will find this book useful in that process.
B. A.