Acorns & Cattails: A Modern Foraging Cookbook of Forest, Farm & Field

by Rob Connoley, Jay Hemphill (Photographs)

The culinary do-it-yourself era is in full swing! Many chefs and cooks are seeking a deeper connection with their food through foraging, farming, and hunting, leading many to cast aside the casserole for modern spins on familiar foods.

In Acorns & Cattails , nationally acclaimed chef Rob Connoley offers more than one hundred recipes featuring ingredients that any home cook can forage, grow, or hunt. Each recipe shares modern flavor and texture pairings that will excite professional chef and home cook alike. The comforting mesquite chocolate chip cookie, the indulgent pork belly poppers, and the haute hackberry rabbit paté launch homespun do-it-yourself dishes into modern classics.

In addition to learning to cook foraged and farmed foods, readers will explore the basics of wild plant harvesting (including identification and ethical best practices) while enjoying humorous anecdotes from Connoley’s years of remote gathering. Photographer Jay Hemphill also presents stunning images that capture the bounty of North America.

Genres: Nonfiction, Cookbooks, Food, Cooking

224 pages, Hardcover

Published September 20, 2016

Reviews

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is of mixed quality, but definitely contains useful information for beginning foragers and creative recipes, most of which include substitutions for store-bought ingredients if the wild article isn't available. Most of the recipes are labor-intensive, but I've gotten good results from them.

But recipe-testing didn't go far enough, if it was done at all, because at least two are missing steps or are unclear. A recipe for crawfish rice balls was clearly missing a step, although I did what seemed to make sense and they turned out great. Another recipe used "acorn starch" and "acorn flour" interchangeably, although they are no more the same thing than are corn starch and cornmeal. From context, it seems like starch was intended, but the book contains no information about obtaining starch, specifically, from acorns. I have no idea how to make this recipe without buying the starch online (which would kind of defeat the purpose, at least for me).

A final foraging gripe -- the book recommends using raw acorns, at least if they taste all right. At least one expert author also recommends doing this, but I never would. Acorns are usually leached to remove some of the tannins (the brown pigment) from the nuts. Tannins are antinutrients that have bad effects on the body in large quantities. Native Americans who depended on acorns for survival always leached them first. I think it would be wise to follow their example, born from many millennia of experience.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written with lovely photographs, this is a special cookbook. Many of the recipes are more in-depth than what I normally cook, but they sound so good I will need to step outside of my box and try them.

I received this book in a good reads giveaway, but the opinion is all my own.