Pawpaw Cake with Spicebush Streusel

Recently, I served this Pawpaw Spicebush Cake - coffee-cake style, with spicebush-pecan streusel - after a plant walk at the Queens Country Farm Museum, a small but remarkably rural-looking farm in the heart of Queens. Because I needed to feed about 16 people I double my recipe and baked it in a big rectangular pan. It worked!

The pawpaw purée for the recipe was from my frozen stash, circa September 2024. The pulp freezes beautifully, and I keep it in half-cup portions for later baking or ice

cream.

And in case you are in doubt, we're talking the native American fruit, Asimina triloba, a custard apple relative, not papaya, which is also called pawpaw in countries with Commonwealth ties, past or present.

And pawpaw season is coming. And the hunt will be on. 

This recipe is in the pawapw chapter of Forage, Harvest, Feast (of course). The streusel in the original is for hazelnuts, but I think pecans work very well indeed. 

Choose field garlic

It's field garlic season, where we live, and perhaps where you are, too. This chive-like wild onion (Allium vineale) is a winter-through-spring weed in North America, but a very tasty one. And infinitely more sustainable than ramps (Allium tricoccum).

Eggs deviled, and destined for a picnic. Their yolky stuffing is laced with fresh field garlic, mustard, and mayonnaise.

And a deeply soothing soup. You'll find its recipe in my story about field garlic for Gardenista (and yes, you can substitute chives, or scallion greens).

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Classes:

4 March, Winter Foraging at the NYBG

11 March, Sugar Moon in Inwood Hill Park

20 March, Vernal Equinox Social, Prospect Park

25 March, Bud-Break at Historic Green-Wood

Of abundance

Time capsule. Brooklyn chestnut blossom on our windowsill in May, 2021. 

Have you ever tasted chestnut honey? It is dark, and slightly bitter, and smells of springtime in a small German town, then only recently released from the East, where Goethe built his theatre, and where I sang, disguised in heavy make-up, false eyelashes, and bespoke costumes. That was long ago. 

But the smell of chestnut honey (more than the blossoms, strangely) whips me instantly to the park in the town where the trees in bloom soared like green cathedrals.

From the forage kitchen, too, last May. How different the season, and how encouraging. A bowl of pokeweed shoots, waiting to be blanched (the pokeweed chapter of Forage, Harvest, Feast explains this in detail, along with lots of recipes, including one for Kentucky Egg Rolls - you'll just have to read it). Pine cone jam and green fir cones, to the right beside the laptop. Some of the cones were pickled some are still buried in miso and must be tested. And who else tapes over the camera on their computer when not in use? I know I'm not slone.

The books on the counter? Let's see: Koji Alchemy, by Rich Shih and Jeremy Umansky, The Complete Bocuse by Paul Bocuse, America - The CookBook, by Gabrielle Langholtz (I contributed the wild recipes), and Larousse Gastronomique, a grand and dated but wonderful reference. Half the stack was for reference and half was for a video meeting (I perch my laptop on them). In the days when culinary residencies were beckoning, only to be tanked by COVID. 

In the background there is a damp paper towel draped to dry over the Frenchman's Nespresso machine. Paper towels are one of weaknesses. But I recycle them.

May is a a busy time. Recipes. Notes to be taken. Constant exploration.

Tuesday confessions complete.

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Persimmon Loaf

Daylight Savings Time is about to end (whyyyyyy?) and persimmons are in season again. So it's time to make hoshigaki, and also this seasonal loaf. (All the recipes in the native American persimmon chapter of my book Forage, Harvest, Feast can be made using the big Asian persimmons we see at market.)

I developed this spiced loaf specially for persimmons. It is fragrant with dried ginger and spicebush (Lindera benzoin) - if you don't have spicebush, substitute microplaned or finely chopped orange zest. But you can also buy the spice, dried, from Integration Acres (where they call is Appalachian allspice). I recommend it highly.

Any ripe persimmon can be used, including the small native American fruit (Diospyros virginiana). If you are using those, or the large, pointy Asian Hachiyas, they should be gelatinously ripe. If not they will taste furry and tannic and ruin the bake. And the native 'simmons and Hachiyas sometimes have seeds, so work them through a food mill or remove by hand. 

Fat-bottomed Fuyus (shown above) are ripe when firm, but mash up their pulp so that it is smooth, for this recipe. You can do this by kneading the flesh hard through the skin, using your thumbs, then scooping it out, or in a food processor. A few small, remaining chunks are OK.

Like native American pawpaws (Asimina triloba), persimmon pulp is dense and the baking time is longer than you would expect, as a result.

Makes 1 large loaf ( 5 ½" x 10 ½" pan)

1 ½ cups ripe persimmon pulp
1 ¼ cups sugar
½  cup melted unsalted butter
3 large eggs
¼ cup plain yogurt

1 Tablespoon ground spicebush (or 2 teaspoons orange zest)
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon salt (this is not a typo)
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda

Optional topping

1 Tablespoon Fir Sugar* (or mix sugar with ginger, or a pinch of cloves)

* See Forage, Harvest, Feast for Fir Sugar (and to learn about spicebush!).

Preheat the oven to 350'F.

Butter a loaf pan 5 ½" x 10 ½" pan (or use two small loaf pans, or even muffin trays, but reduce the baking time to about 50 and 25 minutes, respectively).

In a large bowl, combine the persimmon pulp, sugar, melted butter, eggs, yogurt, spices, and salt. Beat them together until smooth. Add the flour, baking powder, and baking soda and stir these into the wet mixture with a spoon, using as few motions as possible. Transfer the batter to the buttered pan, sprinkle the sugar topping across the batter (if using), and slide into the oven.

Bake for 70 minutes, or until a skewer or toothpick inserted fully into the thickest part come out clean. Gently tip the loaf from the baking pan and allow to cool on a wire rack before slicing.

The harbingers of spring

On a grey Easter Sunday we drove north to the Catskills. Since our last visit, in early March, trees had toppled into the rushing river, changing its profile.

Within minutes the sun came out and the temperature on this warm side of the valley rose from four-layers-plus-woollen-hat-and-gloves to T-shirt. It was wonderful.

And then we found the ramps (Allium tricoccum). I have collected these native wild leeks here for years but this time we walked further than usual. The slopes were greening as far as we could see.

I collected enough leaves to make a large bunch wide enough to fill my backpack. But often I just stood, and stared, smiling at this robust population of the delicious spring edible, so vulnerable to commercial exploitation.  In some places it is wildly abundant. In others it has been razed. 

They are not that hard to cultivate (spring sun, summer shade, humus-rich soil, plenty of moisture). 

The river far below ran fast, while up on the damp slope the ramps were growing almost audibly. In amongst them ephemeral wildflowers like wake-robin and toothwort were beginning to emerge. There were some early insects. And birds catching them. The fragile edge of spring.

Back home, a pot of lamb shoulder had been cooking in a very low oven, all day. Lamb with a spoon, my mom used to call it (I called it spam with a loon). It was fall-apart tender when we walked back into the apartment, eight hours after leaving.

And I added some ramp leaves to melt for a final half hour's fragrance. Their wild onion scent made the Frenchman hum happily.

The next ramp meal was a grilled cheese sandwich, on sourdough I baked late last week. Grated cheddar, mustard, ramp leaves. Cooked in sizzling butter.

A feast. And necessary fuel for all the ramp preservation to follow.  Ramp leaf oil, ramp leaf salt.

Much more ramp stuff in that chapter of Forage, Harvest, Feast. 

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Not-quite-spring snacks

For a recent forage walk on a colder-than-forecast afternoon I made some canapés to accompany small glasses of chilled PandemicVermouth, infused and blended in April 2020. 

On the right are buttery salmon and field garlic (Allium vineale) tarts, with a savory custard filling. To serve them I added more slivers of salmon and extra, snipped field garlic. In the rear? Fir sugar shortbread cookies. Bottom left are toasted rounds of field garlic cheese bread. 

I topped those toasted rounds with garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) pesto and pickled chanterelles, from an epic mushroom hunt in the woods upstate two summers ago. The chanterelles - incredibly - still have that magical apricot aroma that traveled back with us that day.

And there were eggs, not quite deviled. Cooked in boiling water for eight minutes before being peeled and covered in miso, overnight (chilled). The miso flavors them but also draws out some moisture, so the texture becomes firmer. Onto their yolks I dripped some powerful, bright green ramp leaf oil, Aleppo pepper, and the peppery leaves of bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta), a maligned but exquisitely pretty edible green in the Brassica family - like tiny watercress. 

Socially distanced walks and picnics are a challenge but everyone is well-trained, by now, and very considerate. (At least, the people who sign up, are!) There will be more, and it feels good to be creating wild food treats, again.

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Forage, Harvest, Feast - A Wild-Inspired Cuisine

Hot Pot - For What Ails Ye

The kitchen, the night of the day that this country's band-aid was ripped off to expose what wasn't really a mosquito bite, after all. Cue flesh-eating bacteria.

Not a good description of dinner, is it? 

But dinner was actually good. And the process of making it, necessary.  Even though it could have fed an imaginary army.  (Is that what I was doing?)

I revisited the burdock chapter or Forage, Harvest, Feast and reproduced the slow-cooked Burdock Root and Beef Short Rib Hot Pot on page 67. Didn't matter that I didn't have mugwort. In fact, if you don't have the burdock, use parsnips! Or even potatoes. It's delicious. 

And it heats up beautifully, the next day.

My burdock came from Chinatown, and in years past I have seen it at Whole Foods, too. But autumn winter and early spring are good times to dig that tenacious taproot.

What were you doing while Rome burned?

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Forage, Harvest, Feast - A Wild-Inspired Cuisine

Lockdown lunch

Once a week I cook something that the Frenchman and I can share, sitting at the kitchen counter (which is where I write) in the middle of our work days.

And for as long as he has to work from home, we call it lockdown. How the seasons have changed. Pre-spring is late summer. And here we are.

I seem fated to discover the best mushrooms only when I have left the house in sweats and running shoes, bound for exercise only - a nearby hill in Prospect Park, where I run up, and down, up and down. Basketless, bagless, knifeless, as a forager I am unarmed. It's happened twice in the last eight days. (Last week it was chanterelles, incredibly. In Brooklyn!). 

Yesterday's discovery was a beautiful chicken of the woods, growing on a street oak, and still at the first, elusive and moist nubbin stage, before its chubby curves have fanned out into impressively huge but dry shelves. On my way back from the hill, I scooped it up and carried it home.

Today it became part of the topping for our weekly lunch: steamed eggs. Just eggs and cream (although sometimes milk, and sometimes hot water, depending on the texture I want), poured into bowls and steamed for 7 minutes. Very smooth, and purposefully bland. The seasoning today was all in the topping. Some of the mushroom, slowly caramelized in the juices of an overripe heirloom tomato, a dash of strong, dark tamari, and a final slivering of a soy-pickled shiso leaf from the terrace. 

Eaten in two minutes. 

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Eat Wildly (Hint: Major Book Sale - $10 )

Summer's wildness

Some high summer forages, in season when the air turns sticky:

Spicebush (Lindera benzoin) - fragrant like orange peel and a little like fresh black pepper (in aroma, not taste). The leaves, twigs and fruit are all useful and flavorful and I deploy them in different ways (see that chapter in Forage, Harvest, Feast). Thus is a wonderful eastern North American native shrub-slash-small-tree for you to grow at home, too.

Wineberries (Rubus phoenicolasius) - an invasive wild raspberry originally from Asia and imported to serve as a rootstock for domestic cultivars. Easily identified in any season by its very furry and prickly canes.

Below the fruit, native wild mountain mint (Pycnanthemum tenuifolium) and an escaped wild pineapple mint. The mountain mint is a wonderful perennial for a sunny garden and pollinators love it. The leaves are intensely, well...pepperminty.

And to the right, the misunderstood and underappreciated native American burnweed. Erechtites hieraciifolius. It is very pungent, slightly bitter, and I love it. The chapter on it in Forage, Harvest, Feast explains much more, but I equate it with cilantro, in terms of love-it or hate-it. This is the time of year when I make a charred chicken stew (the chicken is first fire-seared), a wild riff on a Kenyan classic, that also features spicebush, sumac, coconut milk, and peanut butter! It's incredible. My mouth is watering as I type (it's on page 23 of the book).

Forage on.

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Forage, Harvest, Feast

(always in season)

Summer Greens

It is June and amaranth is in season in New York. You can buy it now by the bunch at farmers markets, sold as amaranth or callaloo (callaloo is a Caribbean catch-all that could also refer to taro leaves). 

Or you can collect the tender tips, leaves and unripe green seedheads - source of the pseudo-grain seeds - in your garden and or in wild places where it is known much less properly as pigweed. 

Regardless, it is a delicious cooked green.

This recipe is from the amaranth chapter of Forage, Harvest, Feast, and it makes the most of the first farmers market tomatoes, ripe and unripe, and soft, creamy fresh mozzarella. Read a bit more about amaranth in the intro to that chapter, because there is lots to know. 

Other recipes there include Amaranth Breakfast Tacos, Amaranth Greens with Sumac Schwarma Spice, Preserved lemon and Pigweed Pesto, Amaranth and Caramelized Onions on Toast, Amaranth Callaloo, Amaranth and Sheep Sorrel Chicken Bredie (for South Africans), and Amaranth and Spiced Lamb Stew.

Now I'm hungry...   

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66 on Instagram

The camera turns

An accidental selfie. I hate selfies. And if you'd told me just a few weeks ago that I'd be making homespun videos in our kitchen this week I'd have laughed, and rolled my eyes.

But lockdown is waking up all kinds of slumbering beasts in all of us.

It began with an Instagram invitation to share a wild foods story and then I decided I didn't hate it as much as I expected to. So I may even graduate to teaching from home. I just need to practise some more and sort out some kinks.

What new things have you been trying?

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Read a Book

Fir - the love of December

Go on, buy me for the holidays. Either on my publisher's site (35% off), or from your local bookstore. Or you, know, at the other place.

Because it's time to play with fir - the most delicious scent and wonderful flavor. Fir is not pine, and pine is not spruce, and spruce is not hemlock, and hemlock is not larch. None of them are yew. Don't eat yew. Evergreens with needles can be confusing. Fir belongs to the Abies genus, and has unmistakably fragrant needles (the others are all interesting - and edible, too, except the yew - but without the distinct aroma of the freezing north in December).

I made a fresh batch of fir sugar last week. The flavor and scent last years. Literally. Although the fresh green will fade with time.

You need fir sugar on your party glasses.

Or on your drink for one. This is Firgid, from the book.

And this is house-cured gravlax. Recipe in the book. So easy. Memorably delicious.

And here are the fir smoked potatoes you should not live without. Roasted in duck fat. And you don't need a smoker.

And here is dessert. Made with this season's Meyer lemons.

I told you. You need to buy me. 

Have fun!

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New Year's Day Walk + Picnic

(Yes, there will be fir)

Cranberry Cocktails

It may be dark before five o'clock but cranberries have arrived. At farmers markets the local fruits are piled loose in bins, and in supermarkets red bags are stacked like miniature crimson sandbags, imports from New England, the West Coast and British Columbia (for beautiful pictures of that BC cranberry harvest, see the Frenchman's post from when he still lived in Vancouver).

To celebrate cranberry season, I have a slew of original cranberry mixology creations residing next door, at 66 Square Feet (the Food). It is the first in a series that will continue over the next week. Learn to make delicious Red Rita, above, with cranberry sour syrup and cranberry brine.

And yes, it is perfect for Thanksgiving.

Eating wisteria flowers - an ephemeral treat

It seems a shame to let May go without looking back at the wonderful ways of wisteria blossom. North of us wisteria panicles are still dripping from wherever they twine. And at 1st Place, our last address, I found that pruning the rampant, ancient old vine there resulted in fresh blooms in July, so by all means hack back hard as soon as they have finished blooming if you would like to enjoy these perfumed flowers again in the sullen, hot days of late summer.

Wisteria sinensis is very invasive locally (it smothers and strangles trees and shrubs), and can be very aggressive. Which is good for foragers, since it has invaded our city forests. Native W. frutescens is slightly more laid back and a better choice if you would like to plant one at home.

Look in Forage, Harvest, Feast for these recipes. And if you happen to be one of the people who has left an Amazon review for the book, thank you very, very much! They really do help sales.

The recipe for this Concentrated Wisteria Syrup, above, is on page 441 of Forage, Harvest, Feast. It is very aromatic. I make syrup because I like to bake with it, and to make drinks:

...to wit: Like a julep, but I shook it up, instead. And there are black locust flowers in the background! Yes, they have their own book chapter, too.

Still julep-ing, and with wisteria ice cubes.

This is Misteria (my name for the plant when I was very small), page 442 - read all about it. Delicious with tart-sweet sumac sugar. That's another chapter... (but check out page 405).

Vinegar. Does anyone like vinegar as much as I do? I am lost without it. For slow cooking adobo-type dishes, for mixing low ABV drinks (the new mixology catch phrase: low alcohol by volume; last year they were mocktails), and for quick pickles. Salad dressing, of course. I have a quick vinegar method in FHF, but to ferment from scratch - very satisfying - follow the Common Milkweed Flower Vinegar method on page 98.

The vinegar is also very good for baking biscuits and Fluffy Wisteria Pancakes (page 444.)

I LOVE tahini with vinegar, as a vibrant, tongue-smacking, but creamy dressing. This chickpea salad is a riff on one I used to inhale at Anatoli on Sunday nights in long-ago Cape Town (made with giant white beans). It's really good with slivers of raw, red onion. Page 443.

This is made with summer wisteria. Basil's ready, real tomatoes are ripe (I always wait). Mint. Balsamic, salt. Hm, hm, hm

And to finish (especially on this hot, hot late May day and Memorial Day weekend), wisteria and Nigori sake popsicles. Page 443.

For grown ups. Or for loud children who need swift sedation.

Your choice.

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Come on a Wild Walk

Wild Dinner and Walk at Stone Acres Farm, Connecticut

On Thursday I am driving up to Stonington, Connecticut (in our beloved Ntiniwe), to forage in New England's early spring. It will be like going back in time - further south we are several weeks ahead of the Connecticut shore; how often is one allowed to rewind spring? Very exciting.

Roast ramp leaf oil from Forage, Harvest Feast

On Friday evening those forages, and the ones chef James Wayman and his crew are preparing this week, will come together at Stone Acres Farm in a fireside evening inspired by my book Forage, Harvest Feast - A Wild-Inspired Cuisine.

Vermouth from the Mugwort chapter

There will be feral cocktails, regional vermouth, and flights of wild treats, ranging from local shellfish (clams, oysters), to grass-raised beef, and desserts featuring regional native herbs like spicebush and bayberry.

James is the founder of Mystic's stand-out eateries The Oyster Club, Engine Room, and Grass and Bone, and is the visionary behind the local farm to table, field to table, and sea to table movement, where he is literally helping shape the food scene, bringing regional and ethical fare to local tables. He is an avid forager and a real food hero and I am thrilled to be cohosting this spring fling with him. Copies of Forage, Harvest, Feast are included in the ticket price.

If you'd like to make a weekend of it, stay over and come foraging with me the next day, too. This is a gorgeous part of the world (and the shoreline, oysters and outstanding restaurants are worth the trip, even if you can't make this date.)

Stone Acres Farm, Stonington, CT
26 April 2019
6.30pm - 9.30pm

Please book here

And on Saturday the 27th, I will be back at Stone Acres Leading a forage walk at in the morning, where we collect the fixings for our lunch, which follows. Yes, you get to cook your own wild lunch. I promise it will be OK.

Please book for the forage walk and lunch via the Yellow Farmhouse Education Center.

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Local Spring Walks Here

Cape Town Elderflowers

My conservationist-friend Don (who is the new curator of the Stellenbosch Botanical Garden) heard I was foraging for elderflowers in Cape Town. So he WhatsApped me a map with a pin GPS'd onto a "motherlode" of the shrub. It is is (very) invasive locally. I headed there and struck summer gold. 

I love picking elderflowers - so  quick easy. The umbels are snappable and packed with little blossoms. 

I had already started a small batch of fermented elderflower cordial, and I boosted it with my fresh finds. (Don't be tempted to keep the green stems in the ferment or syrup. Pick-pick-pick. Apart from their potential toxicity I am more offended by the viscous quality that too many green stemmy bits will lend to the cordial.)

The kitchen table at No. 9 is a good place to work. 

It thrills me that I can find elderflowers in New York and in Cape Town, two hemispheres apart. It's a tough and adaptable plant. My friend Jacqueline kindly brought my mom a copy of Forage Harvest Feast from New York, back in September, so I could use my own recipes (made with Brooklyn flowers!). At the time it was not available in South Africa, but it is now being sold on Loot and it will be in local shops around late February. Ask your local bookshops (and please tell them that SG are the distributors, if they want to know; it will help them order!).

The elderflower cordial has been fermenting for four days now and is fizzing nicely. Last night I could not resist, and scooped some out and added it to a summer cocktail of white rum, fresh lemon juice, mint from the garden, and fizzy water.

But there are lots of other uses for it, from incredible vinegar (a second and longer fermentation), to potted shrimp, pan juices and deliciously tender madeleines.

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Forage, Harvest, Feast