The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [55]
But one wild edibles tour wasn’t nearly enough. I had gotten merely my first taste of Prospect Park that Saturday, and as luck had it, another foraging tour was taking place that same week. It was led by a man who had been giving wild edibles tours of New York City and its surrounding tristate area’s public parks since the 1970s. He went by the name of “Wildman” Steve Brill.
If you search “wild edibles” in Google you’re likely to come up with Brill’s website first and foremost. So naturally, I had stumbled upon it when doing a little research before Tim’s tour. It’s a jungle of a site, filled with illustrations, folksy allusions and jokes, and plenty of photographs of the wild plants commonly found in the area, at any given time of the year. But the website on its own isn’t really meant to be a guide to eating wild edibles. Steve Brill takes dozens of beginner foragers into parks and wildlife reserves throughout the spring and summer months each year, on average more than once a week. The photos, tips, and plant profiles on Brill’s website are a great reference if you have already done a little bit of foraging first. The real experience, and the much more animated one, is Brill himself on his tour.
That Sunday, I stood in the same spot in Grand Army Plaza, waiting for my tour guide. Because he gives tours so often, Brill asks guests to bring a suggested donation of $10 and to RSVP by phone before showing up to his tours. I did as instructed, and when I spotted a tall, gangly man in his fifties walking up to the crowd sporting beige, safari-bound khaki shorts, a tucked-in T-shirt, large glasses, and a straw hat fitted snugly over a terry cloth sweatband, I knew immediately that it was Brill. This time, the tour group of fifteen to twenty people really ran the gamut in age. There were plenty of middle-aged couples with toddlers, a few middle school kids, a handful of young adults including me, and some senior citizens.
The toddlers were the most verbose. It had been a while since I’d last been in close proximity to a bunch of children for an extended period of time, and their constant squawking seemed exaggerated and endless. But the Wildman, the father of a toddler himself, was a natural entertainer and great with children. Corny jokes rolled out one after another, from the minute he began the tour. And the Wildman’s jaunty step and rapid-fire chatter didn’t fade at all throughout its two-and-a-half-hour course.
One of our first stops was beside a cluster of short sprouts with small yellow clusters at their heads. The tightly bunched heads almost looked like a miniature version of a broccoli crown.
“Hedge mustard,” the Wildman declared. Following his cue, I picked one from the ground and tasted its small, flowering head. A second after chewing it with my front teeth, a strong, spicy mustard taste spread throughout my mouth.
“I think it tastes a little bit like Chinese hot mustard,” said the Wildman. I wasn’t sure if that was exactly the right comparison, but the weed tasted so distinctly flavorful, I couldn’t imagine why our ancestors wouldn’t have chosen it to cultivate thousands of years ago along with other mustards. I grabbed a number of these and tucked them into a plastic bag—I had remembered to take a bunch of bags this time.
“Uh-oh, and you see those?” the Wildman said, pointing to a tall, leafy green. “This is deadly nightshade. It’s pure poison. You can touch it, but whatever you do, don’t eat it.”
On Tim’s tour, too, I had been warned of the deadly nightshade plant. We were standing right by a patch of it when he was introducing us to common plantain, and he’d pointed out how similar the two plants were in appearance. Mistakes could be fatal even if