Happy August, food & foraging friends!
It has been another month on my sick bed, frankly, missing much beloved time in the woods. So I was elated to get to Maine this past week for a long-awaited trip to visit a friend on the island of Isleboro, population 583 as of the 2020 census.
Isleboro was everything I could hope for in a summer getaway: notably, a place with more trees and stars than people and cars! The craggy island, which boasts cute, modestly sized cottages as well as multi-million dollar celebrity homes (also, in the strange parlance of the island, called cottages), is a magical place with some of the oldest rocks in the state and the starriest skies in the universe.
While there are no restaurants on Isleboro besides a small outdoor cafe, wild foods abound. The moment I drove off the car ferry (the only way onto the island), I was greeted with oceanside bushes loaded with bountiful, ripe beach rose hips big as grape tomatoes.
Foragers gonna forage, so I veered the rental car into the ferry parking lot and started noshing on them like a bear in a berry patch. I’d worked with other varieties of rosehips before (see this edition), but those were tiny things and these were huge, with sweet flesh reminiscent of plum. Indeed, plums and other stone fruit are in the same botanical family as roses (Rosaceae), as distant of a branch on the family tree as they might be.
I hatched a plan to make rosehip leather, returning to gather a few pounds of the fruit the next day. The hips are more seed than flesh, and also contain small hairs that can irritate the throat, so it was a labor of love and a little hate to extract the scarce bits of edible flesh from each fruit. One cup of rosehips has 900% the daily recommended dose of Vitamin C. If nothing else I was processing free vitamins with my very expensive labor.
Once the flesh had been separated, the fruit leather was easy enough to make: chop up the fruit a bit, add a little water to make it more spreadable, and moosh the paste down into a thin square on a baking tray. We set the oven to its lowest setting, 170 degrees, and cooked for about five hours.
The result? Well, let’s just say it was as much work to eat it as to make. Right chewy with bits that get easily stuck in your molars. But the flavor was quite interesting, a savory sun-dried tomato flavor on the front end and a sweet and sour fruity flavor on the back. My host used pieces in her morning power smoothie, and I’m now experimenting with it in a kombucha.
Processing wild foods like this can be a lot of work, but such a delight to have in winter, when other fresh local food sources can be scarce and the body can use an extra dose of Vitamin C!
Left/top: Foraged beach rose hips were forged into leather, but best straight from the bush. Right/bottom: The gills of meadow mushrooms (Agaricus campestris) can take on different hues over time, but their spore print will always be dark brown.
My host’s beautiful lawn and garden offered more forageable fare: a patch of meadow mushrooms (Agaricus campestris), being monched on by a band of hungry slugs.
This is reportedly the most commonly consumed wild mushroom in the UK, and a close relative of the most commonly consumed cultivated mushroom in the US: the humble button mushroom (Agaricus bispora). You may already know that Agaricus bispora has many names and guises: the cremini, baby bella and Portobello, all one and the same species.
Agaricus is a tricky genus as there are both poisonous and delicious members in its large pack. The campestris can look very different depending on its age — pink-cheeked gills in its youth turning dark in old age. This mushroom is common in grassy areas (hence the name); smells, well, mushroomy; and has a chocolate brown spore print. It can be mistaken for some of the yellow staining Agaricus, which stains yellow with age and when handled, and has a chemical sort of odor.
The meadow mushroom was a delicious addition to our vegan feasts, enjoyed simply sautéed on crusty bread and tossed with garden herbs, fresh peas and shoots, and island-grown oyster mushrooms in fettucine.
I found many other natural treats and treasures on Isleboro, including chanterelles in a boggy forest, wild radish on the rocks, blackberries in a churchyard and wild thyme in a cemetery. I downed buttery oysters farmed right off the island’s shores and shucked right in front of me at the farmers’ market (check out my sustainable shellfish column this month for good food news on that front). But I know I just scratched the surface of this delightful community in more ways than just its edibles.
Here’s hoping you found a bit of wild wherever this summer found you.
Wildly yours,
April
PS – The Forage and Feast Tour of Virginia’s Northern Neck that keeps shape-shifting is changing yet again! We are paring it down to a one-day offering September 24. Reach out for details; this is the final offer, I promise!