Happy December, food & foraging friends!
“Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible.” That was the infamous line from a 1974 television commercial for Post Grape Nuts cereal featured wild food icon Euell Gibbons, and I still find myself asking people that today.
There is so much to be done with evergreen needles – oxymels, infused vinegars, syrups, booze, and tons of other goodies. Pine, especially Eastern white pine, is plentiful in our area, and it’s a friend with benefits for sure: It’s antiviral, antinflammatory and antiseptic, in addition to having a good dose of Vitamins A and C. The inner bark, cambium, is also an emergency survival food (but break bark for emergencies only — harvesting the cadmium can damage the tree, unlike harvesting some of its needles.)
As a forager, knowing what to avoid is as important as knowing what’s edible. In this case, the one to look out for is yew – a flat leaved, shrubby evergreen with toxic leaves but edible arils (the red fleshy berrylike thing with a hollow center bearing a poisonous seed).
Juniper berries are another plentiful, multipurpose evergreen edible. A few of my favorite uses include throwing them in a sauerkraut (a traditional ingredient); making smreka, a lightly fermented Bosnian drink made from juniper and lemon; and boiling down ground berries into a syrup that makes a nice, light “forest soda” mixed with seltzer water.
Juniper and spruce are also used to make traditional beers. I’m brewing a mugwort juniper beer right now that uses the mugwort as a bittering agent and the naturally occurring yeast on the juniper to kickstart fermentation.
And last but not least – dessert! I’ve used evergreen ground in shortbread and in ice cream (a lemon-fir ice cream recipe by Marie Viljoen to be precise) – evergreen’s citrusy flavor shines through paired with the sweet.
We also ground pine needles in a simple olive oil sugar scrub in a workshop help at ANXO Cidery this month; this is great for circulation and sloughing off dead skin in winter.
Top/left: Juniper berries are bluish when ripe, and are great as wild fermentation starters, like for the smreka pictured here. Bottom/right: Evergreen needles are yummy ground in a cocktail sugar rim among many other things. ID 101: Fir cones point up whereas spruce (pictured here) cones point down. Pine needles grow in bunches as opposed to being directly attached to the stem.
When I look back on all I’ve learned this year, and all the new experiences I’ve enjoyed through wild foods, I’m super grateful, and excited to see what the new year brings. The natural world is an endless source of wonder and joy when we slow down and appreciate everything overhead and underfoot. I look forward to sharing more of my learning adventures with you in 2022!
Wildly yours,
April