The joys of la cueillette

I love to forage. In fact, those four words don't begin to describe my behavior around gathering wild foods. "Forage" somehow seems to imply that this is an activity of last resort--something to do when lost or starving, which at best will yield some marginally edible and definitely unappetizing results. I think I prefer the word "gathering," as in "hunter-gatherers." But even that has a negative connotation: that of a primitive activity--the sort of thing people engaged in before they knew any better. I prefer the French term: la cueillette, which has an unabashedly positive connotation of wild delicacies and pleasurable gathering.

Whether you want to credit her with imbuing a passion, or blame her for imparting a crazy obsession, my Swiss grandmother was responsible for my love of la cueillette. When I was 5 years old, she--for reasons that are still not clear to me--sold her beautiful home on Lake Zurich and came to live with us in the backwoods of Indiana. As she never learned to speak English, she lived out her days in relative isolation, far from her network of friends and wider family. (I remember her writing endless letters, always with the same fountain pen.) Within a couple of years of her arrival, my younger sisters were born, but as they never learned German, she couldn't really talk to them either. The only people she could actually converse with were my mother of course, and me. I had picked up German when I was very young.

Maybe that's why she chose to initiate me into the rites of gathering--an activity which, in Europe, to this day has none of the connotations of marginal, crackpot behavior that it seems to have in the U.S. (although perhaps we Americans are finally moving beyond snickering at Euell Gibbons, but more about that to follow). For example, many a dew-spangled June morning would find my grandmother and me setting out with plastic containers (no lovely baskets in 1960's rural Indiana) on our rundgang. The rundgang (round path or loop) consisted of a couple of miles of dusty, pot-holed gravel roads which eventually brought us full circle back to our house. On the way were a real blacksmith shop, manned by an ancient practicing blacksmith (one of my favorite hangouts); a ramshackle house inhabited by a strangely aggressive solitary man who kept a one-eyed horse in his pasture (I was terrified of this man); and long stretches of wild black raspberries, thriving in the moist soil of the roadside drainage ditch. The untamed bounty of these flavorful berries was the object of our outing. The ostensible object, anyway. As I look back, perhaps it was a way to rationalize taking off into a sun-dappled summer morning and spending it among birdsong and butterflies.

In a sense, our berries were hard-earned. I would come back splashed with the black ditch muck (I remember perfectly its thick, organic stench), my legs lacerated by razor grass and my arms a maze of vicious scratches which stung with sweat, covered with a layer of gritty dust from the occasional passing car.

It was on these forays that I learned how to discern a truly ripe berry through the tactile sensation of my exploring fingertips. The ripe berry--whether raspberry or blackberry--parted from the plant at the slightest touch, falling into our waiting receptacles. The under-ripe fruit required tugging, and was best left on the bush until the next rundgang. And the over-ripe berries squashed when you touched them and paradoxically became restuck to the branch. We never ate many of the berries while we picked, perhaps because if we had, we'd have ended up with little to show for our labors. (To this day, I maintain this strictness with myself when gathering wild fruit. ) Only at home did we with grand largesse parcel out the fruit in bowls for everyone. We ate the berries showered with sugar and doused with light cream. I loved slurping up the last of that slightly sweet cream, stained exotically lavender from the berry juice. In bountiful years, my mother even made jam, effectively hardwiring into me another of my obsessions: jam-making.

Wild strawberries were another object of our forays. A portion of the five acres of scrubby pasture we rented from a neighbor (in fact, the scary, one-eyed horse man), was covered with Fragaria virginiana. Although they bore no thorns to lacerate us with, picking these was much more painstaking than picking raspberries. You had to bend down to ground level, and part the leaves, searching for the shy berries. But, oh! what flavor! A single tiny fruit, about the size of my seven-year-old fingertip, contained a flavor more intense than a mixing bowlful of store-bought strawberries. Etched indelibly into the olfactory inventory of my brain, that flavor has remained for me the gold standard of strawberries.

To this day, I remain hard-wired for gathering. What's more, I've blurred the boundaries between the wild and the cultivated, growing as many wild plants as I can, and using the flavor standard of "wild" to determine which varieties I grow. For instance, I persist in letting the troublesome fraise des hauts-bois, a species of European wild strawberry, remain in my garden. Notice I didn't say that I persist in "growing" this berry, because it is so aggressive that it controls me. Every winter, I have to dig out thousands of its invading minions (talk about a groundcover!) because I am a slave to the flavor of its (stingily produced) fruit which by the way must be eaten immediately after picking. They are so fragile they won't last a single night in the refrigerator. But...put one tiny berry in your mouth and you think you've bitten into a bottle of strawberry perfume.

As I've grown older, I've come to appreciate many wild flavors beyond that of sugar-sweet wild fruits. I still harvest the plump wild blackberries at the edge of our property with all the attention I give my strawberry harvest. But my reigning passion is--and has been for decades--wild vegetables. In the 80s, I was reticent about indulging this passion. It was so uncool, so Euell Gibbons. Remember him and his first book, Stalking the Wild Asparagus?
(Provençal wild asparagus, below left)

This gifted naturalist who unfairly became the butt of innumerable instances of late-night television ridicule and whose name became synonymous with being a crackpot naturalist at the fringe of "society", ultimately had the last laugh. In today's age with its dietary science, "nutrifoods," and the interminable quest for the next super-antioxidant, wild foods have been found to be the motherlode of a host of nutritional elements barely present in wan supermarket vegetables.

Meanwhile, I--the not-very-ex-hippy and closet Gibbonsista--have always harbored a firm conviction that it is imperative to eat as wide a variety of plants as possible, including lots of wild ones. Long before our current nutrition science craze, I was convinced that wild foods contained wonderful and mysterious nutritional elements of which we weren't even aware yet. I have to say that these days, in the wake of Michael Pollan's books, I'm relishing my vindication. But there's another quality to wild foods that intrigues me even more--their varied and vibrant flavors. Edible wild plants are almost never bland. They have bright, exceedingly complex flavors that leap onto your tongue and from there into your brain, informing your inventory of aromas and flavors forever after. And after...well, there's no going back! You come to crave that kind of vibrancy that is due to a combination of simple great taste and--who knows?--your body's registering that it has just received a fabulous bouquet of potent nutrients! That's how I perceive my intoxication with wild plants, anyway.

Of course, I'm not the only cook to be stimulated by wild flavors. Foods that once were the province of the world's poorest populations have now become the signature of some of its most expensive plates. Marc Veyrat, perhaps the chic-est of France's 3-star chefs, has made his reputation on the basis of wild plants. Practically every dish in his two-or three-hundred-euro menus contains an esoteric wild ingredient, often in unrecognizable form, as Veyrat blends a passion for wild ingredients with an unfortunate (in my view) tendency toward molecular cuisine. The presentation of each course always includes instructions on deployment of the dish, and often as not, involves syringes and a liquid nitrogen tank, tableside. Freeze-dried mousseline of spruce needles, anyone?

Me, I'm only too happy to devour my wild greens in more traditional form--simply sauteed with my best olive oil and tossed with pasta, for example, rather than transformed into an herbal marshmallow or some such thing. And spending time in Provence has opened up a multitude of new ingredients for my wild adventures. When our mas was only in the early stages of restoration, I was reading the complete works of Jean Giono, the archetypal writer of Haute Provence, to imbue myself with the authentic spirit of the place. In his pages, I read about people gathering la saladelle in early spring. Immediately, this word sang in my brain. It seemed both musical and affectionate. The volume I was reading contained a helpful glossary translating many of Giono's more arcane words and references, but even the glossary admitted to never having been able to define exactly which plant la saladelle referred to. I believe that la saladelle was not a single plant, but many. I like to think that la saladelle was whatever delicious, tangy, slightly bitter, slightly sweet, nutrient-laden leaves the inhabitants of Haute Provence were able to gather in their local wisdom after a long hard winter of eating cabbage and root vegetables. I'm sure, in fact, that la saladelle must have referred to just such a mixed basket of succulent wild mesclun. And etymologically speaking, la saladelle implies "little salad."

In fact, the title of my current bible is Sauvages et Comestibles--Herbes, Fleurs, et Petites Salades by Marie-Claude Paume. That translates as "Wild and Edible--Herbs, Flowers, and Little Salads. A native of Provence, Mme. Paume's manual is illustrated with her own unmistakeable photos of edible wild plants. I keep her book in my hiking backpack for instant reference, and have committed many of the photos to memory. That was how I was able to recognize the feathery leaves of a just emerging meadow parsnip, right at the boundary of our orchard with the neighboring meadow. According to Mme. Paume, this is one of the most delectable wild greens, but I have restrained my ravenous fingers as I want this plant to go seed. I plan to scatter its progeny in the wild meadow I am cultivating beneath my fruit trees. As regular readers may know, I've sown this meadow with a combinaiton of wildflowers, wild herbs, and wild edible plants that is as equally pleasing to me as to birds, butterflies, and bees (more boundary-blurring).

One of the most delicious wild vegetables of Provence is the wild leek (Allium ampeloprasum), or poireau de vigne. It has been dubbed the grapevine leek because it thrives in vineyards, in dry rocky ground that is frequently cultivated. Above ground, this plant looks just like a more delicate version of the garden leek, with overlapping, bluegreen foliage that is pleated longitudinally. But when you pull it up, you discover its secret. This wild leek, unlike the garden variety, has a bulb resembling an onion, with a curious difference. Dangling among its roots, you'll find numerous, teardrop-shaped bulbils. More of these bulbils are in the process of forming between the outer layers of the bulb, and are clearly visible as protubernces beneath the "skin" of the bulb. As these bulbils develop, they push their way out, bearing one tenuous root at their base which attaches them to the mother plant. It's a very strange form of parthenogenesis. It's also key to why these plants abound in cultivated ground. Each pass of the tractor may destroy the mother plant, but it spreads the hosts of little bulbils throughout the field. You could almost say that this plant has coevolved with the farmer.

Last Sunday, Denis and I had gone to the village of Les Mées for an antique fair. Afterwards, I proposed in a small voice that we visit the olive groves just outside town. Why, Denis wanted to know. "Well, because they're full of wild leeks, and I want to gather some...if you don't mind..." You see, I still harbor a bit of reticence about my Gibbonsista tendencies. But Denis was agreeable (he loves wild leeks), as long as I didn't spend "two hours" doing it, he added. Lucky for me and my time limit, wild leeks abounded under the olive trees in the very first grove we stopped at. I leaped from tree to tree, gently teasing the leeks from the ground (they grow very deep, as any good leek should, naturally blanching their succulent stems without any gardener's intervention.) Growing with the leeks were wild grape hyacinths (also delicious, but too lovely to pull). Within 15 minutes, we had an armload of leeks that weighed a good kilo. As I got back in the car with my prize, my stomach rumbled at the thought of wild leeks with truffle oil vinaigrette.

So just what is this curious joy I experience from gathering wild foods? Part of it, admittedly, is sheer gourmandise--my stomach growling at the thought of eating these delicious plants, as well as the culinary stimulation they provide me. But it's more--and more visceral--than that. When I'm wandering a meadow under a blue sky, gathering wild leaves, I experience an animal sort of mindlessness which I find extremely pleasurable. But at the same time, it is a heightened state of mindfulness that I'm in. I'm not only intensely tuned in the visual patterns presented by the plants beneath my feet, but--if even for a few short moments--I get to live not as a human spoiler to nature--a monster smashing about with my heavy carbon footprint--but as a light-treading human in easy coexistence with what nature has to offer. I feel at home on the earth.

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