Wild Food: A Unique Photographic Guide to Finding, Cooking and Eating Wild Plants, Mushrooms and Seaweed

by Roger Phillips

Roger Phillips, creator of "Wild Flowers" and its bestselling companion volumes, turns his attention and his camera to the wide range of good things to eat from the countryside and seashore. From the multitude of species that are safely edible, he has selected those that are actually attractive and appetizing as food. Beautiful colour photography shows each species growing in the wild - for accurate identification - and prepared as an appealing dish. Well-known wine and food writers such as Jane grigson, Katie Stewart and B.C.A. Turner are among those who have contributed the recipes that accompany Roger Phillips' photographs.

Genres: Cookbooks, Nonfiction, Food, Reference

Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

In 1975 Roger Phillips began his life’s major work of photographing and publishing pictures of the World’s garden plants. Using modern photographic techniques, Roger set out to develop an encyclopedic collection of books to show the difference between plants as diverse as mosses, roses and annuals. His first book Wild Flowers of Britain was a huge success, selling 400,000 copies in the first year. He has since written 20 additional volumes (often with his co-author Martyn Rix) selling over 4.5million copies worldwide.

Roger has written and presented two major six-part TV series on gardening (BBC & Channel 4). Famed for his ebullient personality and garish red glasses, he has become a well-recognised figure in the world of gardening.

Roger trained at Chelsea School of Art from where he entered a career in advertising culminating in the position of art director at Ogilvy & Mather Advertising. He left O&M to start a career as a freelance photographer, winning many awards before turning his photographic talents to the world of natural history.

Reviews

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and mouth-watering book

Not only are the photographs of the wild foods and dishes made from those foods simply gorgeous, they are also artfully and artistically staged. Yes, staged. For example the photo of wild bergamot, spicebush and sweet fern herbal teas (in clear glass and china tea cups) is set among greenery and flowers of bergamot and leaves of sweet fern and a cut lemon resting on old lace. Seaweed dishes are shone with the ocean and rocks in the background; Wild apples rest on the green grass overflowing from a wooden bucket with roast pork and a clear glass jar of the jelly behind; fish lie upon a bed of fennel on a rack over a fire upon a rock near water...

Phillips arranged the presentations and the recipes beginning in the spring of the year featuring young leaves and shoots to be picked and eaten in the merry month of May. Then come the summer flowers and herbs, teas, seaweeds, and then desert plants and then mushrooms. In the fall near the end of the book there are berries and fruits, nuts and seeds and finally roots. The mushroom dishes are really spectacular: morels in cream, morels in a wild rice casserole, chanterelle bread and chanterelles in an omelet. Phillips photographed the mushrooms as picked and also the mushrooms as they appear in the recipes again with natural backgrounds.

Phillips gives the parts of the US in which the wild foods can be found (although he fails to note that blackberries can be found in California), and how to gather the foods and process them. He gives warnings about five “dangerous edible plants,” pokeweed, sassafras, cowslip, lamb’s-quarters and pigweed, and how to avoid the danger.

The strength of this book is clearly in the photos and the recipes. The weakness? Well, this is not as extensive as some wild foods books I’ve read and the recipes rely heavily upon cream, eggs, butter, chicken broth and other ingredients that remind me of France’s grande cuisine which is currently out of fashion. Phillips did the research and the traveling with his wife and young daughter in the 1980s. The book was published in 1986.

Note that the book measures 8.5 by 11.5 inches so that the glossy photos are large enough to be easily appreciated.

—Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”

[Tyler Vivier · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting look at foods of the wilds. The Berries are a great resource.