Wild Eats
Out in the wild, Keith "Catfish" Sutton finds the ultimate free buffet
By Keith Sutton"Good gracious, look at this!" I told Bill when I found the patch of greens. "Poke sallet everywhere!"
In case you've never tried it, let me tell you about poke salad, or "poke sallet," as we call it in the South. When it comes to greens, none can compare to poke sallet's wonderful taste. I love spinach, turnip greens, mustard, kale and collards. But I'll take poke sallet over these any day. It has a distinctive mild flavor that makes it one of the most commonly gathered wild foods wherever it is found.
Bill and I hadn't come to this spot intending to do any wild-foods foraging, so I had nothing to put the poke in if I picked it. The case off a pillow in my car provided an excellent container, however, and I started stuffing it with nearly a bushel of tender, green poke sprouts.
While I was thus occupied, Bill found another delicious wild food: a morel mushroom!
"See if you can find more while I finish picking the poke sallet," I said, excitedly. "If you can find a dozen or so, we'll have one heck of a meal."
As luck would have it, the morels must have just started sprouting. Bill couldn't find any more. But I found yet another useful plant: sassafras! Many knee-high sprouts were scattered around the woods, and I quickly pulled up a couple dozen. When steeped in hot water, sassafras roots make a delicious tea that tastes somewhat like root beer. You also can dry and grind the young leaves to make filé powder, a famous ingredient of Louisiana gumbos.
While we didn't gather them, we found other wild edibles as well, including spring beauties, which have bulbs with a delicious nutlike flavor; wild onions, which can be eaten fresh or used to season other foods; mayapples, which produce a summer fruit that can be used fresh, frozen or canned; and wild violets, the flowers of which are delicious and high in vitamin C. After nibbling a few, Bill proclaimed the latter "pretty darn good."
My interest in wild-food foraging started when I was in college in the 1970s. I was as poor as a church mouse then and lived by myself for a while in a little one-room shack in northeast Arkansas. Being a full-time student with no parents to help, I rarely had enough money to make ends meet.
That was a difficult time. I often rode a bike to my job 25 miles away because I couldn't afford the 35-cent-per-gallon cost of gasoline! When it was cold outside, I slept in a sleeping bag or stood by a campfire in the yard because there often was no propane to heat the shack. The roof of the shack leaked like a sieve, so rainy nights were horrible. Without air conditioning, summers were pretty bad, too. I had running water, thank goodness, but no electricity.
Despite the fact I often was cold, hot or wet, however, I never went hungry. Mealtimes were the bright spots in each day. I had plenty to eat. And almost all my food came straight from nature's larder.
When time permitted, I hunted, fished and trapped. In fact, trapping accounting for much of my winter income. I sold the furs of the raccoons, possums, muskrats and beavers I caught, and the meat from these animals provided many meals.
In spring and summer, I fished for
bass, crappie, catfish, bream and other fish, and caught frogs,
crawfish, turtles, rattlesnakes and other delectable critters. "Catch
and release" wasn't part of my vocabulary then; this was "catch and
eat" exclusively. In fall and winter, I also dined on squirrels,
rabbits, doves, quail, deer and other game killed while hunting.
Most
vegetables in my diet came from a half-acre garden where I grew
everything from tomatoes and squash to sweet potatoes and onions. What
I couldn't eat immediately, I canned or stored for later use. But a
large percentage of the vegetables and fruits I ate, and ingredients
for drinks such as tea, were gathered from the wild.
Spring favorites
included poke, wild asparagus, chickweed, chicory, chives, dandelion,
day lily, elderberry flowers, lamb's quarters, chanterelle and morel
mushrooms, purslane, sassafras and violets. In summer, I had
blackberries, huckleberries, wild strawberries, mayapples, mulberries,
papaws, sumac, sweet goldenrod and watercress. Fall favorites included
persimmons, hickory nuts, walnuts, wild rose hips and wood sorrel.
I
was fortunate to have several wonderful teachers who taught me how to
identify and cook many excellent wild food plants. One of these was a
kind lady named Billy Joe Tatum who lived in a spectacularly situated
Ozark Mountain home called "Wildflower."
A mutual friend in college introduced Billy and me, and I remember with great fondness sitting on her porch near the community of Possum Trot and listening as she described how to use the variety of edible and medicinal plants she gathered from the woods surrounding her home. Many of these were hanging to dry in the rafters of her kitchen. Others were kept in sealed glass jars, in a freezer or were freshly harvested and still in baskets she used for that purpose.
Between puffs on her corn-cob pipe,
she would describe in detail the ways to identify and use each plant.
"The
flowers of elderberries can be dipped in batter and fried to make
excellent fritters," she might say. Or, "The roots of chicory can be
dried, roasted and ground to make a coffee substitute."
She taught me how to make tea from a variety of wild plants, how to season foods with wild ginger, peppergrass and wild mustard seeds, how to recognize tender young greens such as pokeweed, milkweed and sorrel, and much more.
At the end of each visit, we shared a buffet meal at her table
that included many of the wild foods she had just taught us about,
along with other specialties chez Tatum such as coon,
crawdads, possum or groundhog.
In 1976, the same year I met Billy, her book Billy Joe Tatum's
Wild Foods Cookbook & Field Guide
was published. Like her mentor Euell Gibbons, she became a well-known
celebrity, making numerous appearances on television and at speaking
engagements nationwide.
Invitations to enjoy a meal at her home were
much sought after by fellow Arkansas notables like Gov. Bill Clinton
and Winthrop Rockefeller Jr. But she always welcomed me into her home
each time I dropped in for a visit, and always taught me something new
about wild foods when I was there. A signed copy of her book, which
still is considered a classic of the genre, has a place of honor in my
library and is dog-eared from years of use.
Another
of my teachers was Larry Lowman, a naturalist at Village Creek State
Park near Wynne, Arkansas, where I worked during my college years.
Larry was a botanist with a keen interest in edible and medicinal
plants. Each day throughout my first year as seasonal interpreter, he
took me into the park's woods and fields to teach me about the bounties
of nature one could harvest each season.
The lessons were intended to
provide me knowledge of wild-foods foraging I could share with park
visitors. But Larry also was an excellent cook, and the meals he
whipped up from the things we gathered showed me just how delicious
wild plant foods can be. Because these foods were plentiful and free
for the taking, they proved a real blessing to a college boy trying to
make it through each day. When served on the side with the abundance of
fish and game I brought home, they provided full-course meals that were
both satisfying and healthy.
My
foraging forays are much less frequent now, but my family still eats
game and fish year-round, supplemented with occasional sides of poke
sallet, morels, asparagus and other wild favorites. We sometimes make
jelly or desserts from wild fruits such as muscadines and blackberries.
And I still love a cup of hot sassafras tea now and then.
I
don't have to rely on wild foods to keep my belly full any more. But
it's nice knowing if times get tough, I can still keep my family well
fed from nature's larder. With a little study, you can, too. Courses on
wild plant identification are offered at many colleges, parks and other
venues.
Many excellent field guides to edible and medicinal plants also
are available, and if you're lucky, you might find a foraging
enthusiast who will teach you the ropes the way Billy and Larry taught
me. Foraging for wild foods offers many rewards, both in learning and
in the wild-food hunting itself. And perhaps the greatest reward comes
in cooking the new and interesting finds you have made.
After
Bill and I returned home, I picked the stems off all the poke shoots,
and my wife Theresa cooked up a huge pot of fresh greens. I pounded the
sassafras roots with a meat mallet to loosen the bark, peeled them and
steeped them in hot water to make a delicious tea. The one morel wasn't
enough for even one serving, but sliced and fried in butter, it made a
great topping for the butter-broiled crappie fillets I cooked for an
entrée.
That was a meal fit for a king, and it didn't cost a dime.
In
my next post, some tips on using a variety of edible plants. And please
be reminded that autographed copies of my wild game cookbook, Duck
Gumbo to Barbecued Coon, can be purchased by visiting www.catfishsutton.com.
