A Forager's Year: Marie Viljoen's Seasonal Retrospective of Edible Finds
Photography by Marie Viljoen. For foragers (and anyone whose spirit is entwined with day-length) facing down a steel-bleak Northern January can be daunting. Dinner plate-sized oyster mushrooms gathered from a log on a frozen January day. Fir sugar made from our organic holiday tree’s needles, destined for pistachio cookies. A winter breakfast of sugar-broiled grapefruit with a whisper of chopped fir needles. Photograph by Jenny Hamp. Intrepid New Yorkers gathering with me for a frigid February forage picnic. Chickweed’s corn-silk-tasting tips and ground ivy’s herbal leaves atop eight-minute eggs. Smoked sardines under a comforter of winter-hardy field garlic. The first daylily shoots, destined for blanching, and bruschetta. Optimistic deviled eggs with the earliest cherry blossoms (Prunus x subhirtella). Magnolia buds infusing white wine vinegar with their gingery flavor. Fresh and pickled rounds of Japanese knotweed with dandelion flowers and burrata. Edible forsythia illuminating tiny tartlets. A mugwort salt-cured egg yolk with chickweed spaghettini. Peppery wintercress flower butter and fresh sourdough. Snap pea-tasting red bud blossoms on shoyu-dressed steamed sticky rice. A lilac-bedecked supper table in the endless evening light of late May. As the clock strikes June, the serviceberries (a.k.a Juneberries) ripen. Check before you gather—ladybug larvae and succulent lambs quarters. A midsummer treat of steamed yucca (Yucca filamentosa) buds, with ramp leaf mayonnaise. Steamy July wakes up the black trumpet mushrooms on forest floors. Chanterelles and black trumpets make July’s humidity almost worth enduring. Invasive wineberries are sweetly tart. Elderberries at last, and enough to make a year’s-worth of syrup. The end of daylily season means plenty of spent flowers to collect, dry, and eat. Pungent American burnweed (Erechites hieraciifolius) in a boldly-spiced salad with mango and radish. Beach plums on Long Island, gathered in a thunderstorm. Chicken of the woods, like that rainbow’s pot of gold. Cornelian cherry (Cornus mas) preserves. Brooklyn neighborhood figs are ripe. Invasive autumn olives are also called Japanese silverberries, and are loaded with lycopene. In New York City, October is hen of the woods o’clock. The aroma of hardy oranges is captured in a Korean-style cheong, an uncooked, fermented marmalade. The New Jersey Pine Barrens have all kinds of magic, like turquoise waters and matsutake mushrooms. Mukitake mushrooms fruit every November at a Catskills stream. December wind storms drop dead branches frilled with edible amber jelly fungus (like mushroom gummy bears). And it’s field garlic season, again. The year ends as it began, with welcome winter oyster mushrooms. But it will be food for thought, and perhaps for dinner.