Edible Garden Weeds of Canada and Edible Wild Fruits and Nuts of Canada
by Nancy Turner and Adam Szczawinski are becoming classics. These are among the first quality wild food
books to include ethnobotanical information, plant accounts, and author tested
recipes. Sold to the Canadian audience
but very relevant to the Pacific Northwest (Turner lives in Victoria BC). Turner is an internationally renowned scholar
of Ethnobotany.
Buy Edible Garden Weeds from Amazon
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Fruits and Nuts from Amazon
Hailing from Oregon and frequently teaching in Washington, John
Kallas’s book Edible Wild Plants,
wild food from dirt to plate has excellent coverage of the Pacific
Northwest. This volume focus on wild
greens and vegetables, and future volumes will cover fruits and more. It includes detailed and well researched
plant accounts, tasty recipes, and a lot of great pictures.
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Renewing Salmon Nation’s Food Traditions edited by Gary Paul
Nabhan provides brief accounts for 180 plants, animals, and fungi that were
used by Native Americans, explorers, and early settlers in the Pacific
Northwest.
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Renewing
America’s Food Traditions celebrates the history of endangered food
traditions from across North America including both Indigenous and heirloom
foods. The book is divided up into
“nations,” with the Salmon Nation covering our area. Accounts have wonderful pictures and colorful
histories.
View at GoogleBooks
Sam Thayer’s books Forager’s Harvest and Nature’s Garden have set a new
standard for thorough plant accounts based on personally verified and
meticulously referenced information. He
includes excellent photographs (about 6 per account!) and brilliant essays on
topics related to foraging. Species
coverage is continental with the majority of accounts having relevance to the
Pacific Northwest.
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Author
Buy Forager’s
Harvest from Amazon
Buy Nature’s
Garden from Amazon
Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, and
Stalking the Healing Herbs by
Euell Gibbons are the classic books on wild edible foods. With limited illustrations, their strength is
in the detail and skillfully written accounts.
They cover a broad range of plants and animal across North America, but
still have a great deal of relevance to the Pacific Northwest. Quite possible still the best sold books on
the subject and easily found at your local used book store.
Wild Berries of the West by Betty
Derig and Margaret Fuller has excellent coverage of almost all the fruit
producing plants west of the Rockies, from delicious to poisonous. Accounts include photographs historical uses,
and tips on growing them in your garden.
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Discovering Wild Plants: Alaska, Western Canada, the Northwest by Janice Schofield provides photographs, plant descriptions, and
well cited notes on the culinary and medicinal value of several species with
personal reflections and recipes from the author.
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Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide by Thomas Elias and Peter Dykeman comes complete with full plant
descriptions, photographs, and even range maps (rare in a wild food book). The plant accounts are detailed and discuss
how to prepare each edible part of the plant.
This is a guide for all of North America and worth a spot in a NW
forager’s library.
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Spirit of the Harvest: North American Indian Cooking by Beverly Cox and Martin Jacobs.
This award winning cookbook has recipes from around the country but it
has a large section on Northwest native foods.
Skokomish elder Bruce Miller provided several of the recipes.
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Čamus: West
Coast Cooking Nuu-chah-nulth style by Uu-a-thluk is a collection of traditional
Nuu-chah-nulth recipes. They also
provide a feasting toolkit
that includes pamphlets about pit cooking, smoking salmon, herring spawn, and
more.
Buy from publisher
Where People Feast by Dolly and
Annie Watts is an Indigenous People’s Cookebook with traditionally inspired
recipes for the Pacific Northwest.
Preview on author’s website
Purchase on Amazon
Traditional Food Guide by the Alaska Native Health Consortium is
cookbook that includes
recipes, nutritional information and cultural teachings.
Purchase from the publishers
Pacific Feasts by Jennifer Hahn
focuses squarely on the Pacific Northwest.
She covers foods from all walks, crawls, and swims of life, with deep
roots in a variety of soils, in a way that leaves you with a berry big smile. Contains recipes, plant accounts, and essays.
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Fat of the Land by Langdon Cook is a book and blog combo that explores Puget
Sound’s bountiful wild foods. Following
food throughout the seasons, each chapter focuses on a single food type and
concludes with an author tested recipe.
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Hunter
Angler Gardener Cook is
Hank Shaw’s wildly popular wild food cooking website. Also look for his book called Hunt,
Gather, Cook, Finding the Forgotten Feast.
Although he is based out of California, most recipes are appropriate for
the Pacific Northwest.
View Website
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The Neighborhood Forager by Robert
Henderson is a guide and cookbook for local wild foods.
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Wild Fruits by Henry David Thoreau may have limited relevance to our area (it
is about the NE US) but is filled with poetic accounts of many closely related
species. Thoreau’s manuscript for this
charming book was rediscovered and published more than a hundred years after
his death.
View at GoogleBooks
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The North American Guide to Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms by Nancy Turner and Patrick Von Aderkas is an indispensable guide
to plants we need to know (and avoid!) in order to safely forage.
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