Books (CULINARY HERBALISM)

New York Times and USA Today Bestseller

"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." With these seven words, Michael Pollan—brother of Lori, Dana, and Tracy Pollan, and son of Corky—started a national conversation about how to eat for optimal health. Over a decade later, the idea of eating mostly plants has become ubiquitous.

But what does choosing "mostly plants" look like in real life? For the Pollans, it means eating more of the things that nourish us, and less of the things that don’t. It means cutting down on the amount of animal protein we consume, rather than eliminating it completely, and focusing on vegetables as the building blocks of our meals.

This approach to eating—also known as a flexitarian lifestyle—allows for flavor and pleasure as well as nutrition and sustainability. In Mostly Plants, readers will find inventive and unexpected ways to focus on cooking with vegetables—dishes such as Ratatouille Gratin with Chicken or Vegetarian Sausage; Crispy Kale and Potato Hash with Fried Eggs; Linguine with Spinach and Golden Garlic Breadcrumbs; and Roasted Tomato Soup with Gruyere Chickpea "Croutons".

Like any family, the Pollans each have different needs and priorities: two are vegetarian; several are cooking for a crowd every night. In Mostly Plants, readers will find recipes that satisfy all of these dietary needs, and can also be made vegan. And the best part: many of these dishes can be on the table in 35 minutes or less! With skillet-to-oven recipes, sheet pan suppers, one pot meals and more, this is real cooking for real life: meals that are wholesome, flavorful, and mostly plant based.

The Drunken Botanist, the plants that create the worlds great drinks by Amy Stewart

The Essential, New York Times–Bestselling Guide to Botany and Booze

“A book that makes familiar drinks seem new again . . . Through this horticultural lens, a mixed drink becomes a cornucopia of plants.”—NPR's Morning Edition

“Amy Stewart has a way of making gardening seem exciting, even a little dangerous.” —The New York Times

Sake began with a grain of rice. Scotch emerged from barley, tequila from agave, rum from sugarcane, bourbon from corn. Thirsty yet?  In The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart explores the dizzying array of herbs, flowers, trees, fruits, and fungi that humans have, through ingenuity, inspiration, and sheer desperation, contrived to transform into alcohol over the centuries.

Of all the extraordinary and obscure plants that have been fermented and distilled, a few are dangerous, some are downright bizarre, and one is as ancient as dinosaurs—but each represents a unique cultural contribution to our global drinking traditions and our history.

This fascinating concoction of biology, chemistry, history, etymology, and mixology—with more than fifty drink recipes and growing tips for gardeners—will make you the most popular guest at any cocktail party.

Basic Fermentation a do-it-yourself guide to cultural manipulation by Sandor Ellix Katz

A classic beginner's guide to fermenting just about anything.

At last, a new edition of fermentation guru Sandor Katz's first published work, including all new, step-by-step photography. A great introduction to fermenting foods at home, whether you're looking to expand your kitchen repertoire into exciting new flavors or seeking to make affordable, natural, probiotic food to heal your guts and soothe your soul. Includes clear, straightforward instructions to get you started making anything fermentable, from bread to cheese to yogurt to kimchi to miso to injera to honey wine. Who knew making tasty, healthy, interesting food could be so simple?

Sandor Ellix Katz considers himself a fermentation revivalist. He has written several award-winning books and taught hundreds of workshops around the world empowering people to create their own fermented foods. The New York Times calls him “one of the unlikely rock stars of the American food scene.”

Forage, Harvest, Feast. A wild inspired cuisine.

By Marie Viljoen

I cannot say enough about this book! Wow! Out of many culinary herb books we choose this one for it’s unique take on forgotten medicinals.

In this groundbreaking collection of 510 wild food recipes, celebrated New York City forager, cook, kitchen gardener, and writer Marie Viljoen incorporates wild ingredients into everyday and special occasion fare. Motivated by a hunger for new flavors and working with thirty-six versatile wild plants―some increasingly found in farmers markets―she offers deliciously compelling recipes for everything from cocktails and snacks to appetizers, entrées, and desserts, as well as bakes, breads, preserves, sauces, syrups, ferments, spices, and salts.
From underexplored native flavors like bayberry and spicebush to accessible ecological threats like Japanese knotweed and mugwort, Viljoen presents hundreds of recipes unprecedented in scope. They range from simple quickweed griddle cakes with American burnweed butter to sophisticated dishes like a souffléed tomato roulade stuffed with garlic mustard, or scallops seared with sweet white clover, cattail pollen, and sweetfern butter. Viljoen makes unfamiliar ingredients familiar by treating each to a thorough culinary examination, allowing readers to grasp every plant's character and inflection.
Forage, Harvest, Feast―featuring hundreds of color photographs as well as cultivation tips for plants easily grown at home―is destined to become a standard reference for any cook wanting to transform wildcrafted ingredients into exceptional dishes, spices, and drinks.
Eating wild food, Viljoen reminds us, is a radical act of remembering and honoring our shared heritage. Led by a quest for exceptional flavor and ecologically sound harvesting, she tames the feral kitchen, making it recognizable and welcoming to regular cooks.

While there were major variations from region to region and from season to season, in general, the traditional diets of Indigenous peoples of North America were remarkably healthy--high in protein and nutrients, low in salt, sugar and nearly without refined carbohydrates, featuring large and small game, waterfowl, eggs, fish and seafood, tubers, berries, tree roots, grasses, seeds and cultivated food crops.

As a classically trained chef of First Nations heritage, David Wolfman has a passion for bringing these traditional food sources together with European cooking techniques. In Cooking with the Wolfman, he and his wife, Marlene, share recipes gathered from David's career as a caterer, culinary professor and host of a popular cooking show, as well as a few family favourites, like an updated version of Marlene's great-grandmother's recipe for pemmican.

Covering everything from the origin of bannock to the finer points of filleting a fish, Cooking with the Wolfman is accessible to readers of every culinary skill level, with step-by-step instructions and charts covering the fundamentals of cooking, from knife handling techniques, choosing cuts of meat and making stocks and sauces to home smoking.

From foodies who want to try locally foraged ingredients to Indigenous cooks looking for new ways to enjoy familiar traditional foods, David Wolfman's easy-to-follow recipes make Indigenous Fusion available to everyone. With over one hundred recipes including Buffalo Egg Rolls with Mango Strawberry Dip, Buttery Bourbon Hot-Smoked Oysters, Slow-Cooked Ginger Caribou Shanks, and Blackened Sea Scallops with Cream of Pumpkin as well as beautiful colour photographs, Cooking with the Wolfman will inspire readers to bring more traditional foods into their kitchens.

From talented herbalist and writer Spencre McGowan comes this book of cordial recipes that use the power of plants to heal (and also make some delicious cocktails).

Blotto Botany is a gorgeous little book of medicinal cordials created by herbalist and witchy healing expert Spencre McGowan. Blotto Botany was originally a zine that swept the indie circuit, and we are now turning it into a full-length book with nods to the original design. Inside, readers and herbalism practitioners will find 40 cordial recipes organized by season, each with their own healing properties. Soothe Yourself Tonic, for instance, soothes the nerves after a hard day with gentle lemon balm and rose petals. Lovers’ Lip, by contrast, contains stimulating damiana and elderflower, the perfect recipe for “one, two, or few.” Other recipes include:

Blotto Botany also comes with recipes for medicinal shrubs and syrups, as well as details on plant lore, wild crafting, crystals, and the use of red wine vs. white wine in infusions.

The design and package of Blotto Botany also sets it apart as a truly unique work—each page is a four color collage and some photography, all created by the author, and all the recipes are written in her own handwriting. This is one of the most special packages on the market place—our goal was to capture the look and feel of the bespoke original zine, and in so doing, we have created a cocktail book that whispers of homespun plant magic.

Uncommon Fruits & Vegetables: A Commonsense Guide was first published in 1986 to a fanfare of outstanding reviews and has become a modern-day classic. Now more timely than ever, this encyclopedic cookbook answers the most pertinent questions about the rainbow of fruits and vegetables available in supermarkets nationwide. Here is what home cooks need to know about arugula, cilantro, mango, shiitake, and snow pea as well as the less familiar carambola, chanterelle, lemongrass, passion fruit, and tomatillo. Descriptions rich in culinary, botanical, and historical information set the stage for nearly 100 of these produce items, while detailed methods of selection, storage, and preparation lead to more than 400 easy-to-follow recipes designed to bring out the best in each fruit and vegetable.

Uncommon Fruits & Vegetables is an indispensable reference for home cooks and professionals, gardeners and world travelers, and the food-curious everywhere.

Acorns & Cattails. A modern foraging cookbook of forest, farm & field. By Rob Connoley

The culinary do-it-yourself era is in full swing! Many chefs and cooks are seeking a deeper connection with their food through foraging, farming, and hunting, leading many to cast aside the casserole for modern spins on familiar foods.

In Acorns & Cattails, nationally acclaimed chef Rob Connoley offers more than one hundred recipes featuring ingredients that any home cook can forage, grow, or hunt. Each recipe shares modern flavor and texture pairings that will excite professional chef and home cook alike. The comforting mesquite chocolate chip cookie, the indulgent pork belly poppers, and the haute hackberry rabbit paté launch homespun do-it-yourself dishes into modern classics.

In addition to learning to cook foraged and farmed foods, readers will explore the basics of wild plant harvesting (including identification and ethical best practices) while enjoying humorous anecdotes from Connoley’s years of remote gathering. Photographer Jay Hemphill also presents stunning images that capture the bounty of North America.

Wildcrafted Fermentation. Exploring, transforming, and preserving the wild flavors of your local terroir. BY Pascal Baudar

Wild krauts and kimchis, fermented forest brews, seawater brines, plant-based cheeses, and more

One of the most influential tastemakers of our time invites you on an extraordinary culinary journey into the lacto-fermentation universe of common wild edibles. Used for thousands of years by different cultures all around the world, lacto-fermentation is the easiest, safest, and most delicious way to preserve food. And nature provides all the necessary ingredients: plants, salt, and the beneficial lactic acid bacteria found everywhere.

In Wildcrafted Fermentation, Pascal Baudar describes in detail how to create rich, flavorful lacto-ferments at home from the wild and cultivated plants in your local landscape or garden. From sauerkrauts and kimchis to savory pastes, hot sauces, and dehydrated spice blends, Baudar includes more than 100 easy-to-follow, plant-based recipes to inspire even the most jaded palate. Step-by-step photos illustrate foraging, preparation, and fermentation techniques for both wild and cultivated plants that will change your relationship to the edible landscape and give you the confidence to succeed like a pro.

So much more than a cookbook, Wildcrafted Fermentation offers a deeply rewarding way to reconnect with nature through the greens, stems, roots, berries, fruits, and seeds of your local terroir. Adventurous and creative, this cookbook will help you rewild your probiotic palate and “create a cuisine unique to you and your environment.”

Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz

The Book That Started the Fermentation Revolution

Sandor Ellix Katz, winner of a James Beard Award and New York Times bestselling author, whom Michael Pollan calls the “Johnny Appleseed of Fermentation” returns to the iconic book that started it all, but with a fresh perspective, renewed enthusiasm, and expanded wisdom from his travels around the world. This self-described fermentation revivalist is perhaps best known simply as Sandorkraut, which describes his joyful and demystifying approach to making and eating fermented foods, the health benefits of which have helped launch a nutrition-based food revolution.

Since its publication in 2003, and aided by Katz’s engaging and fervent workshop presentations, Wild Fermentation has inspired people to turn their kitchens into food labs: fermenting vegetables into sauerkraut, milk into cheese or yogurt, grains into sourdough bread, and much more. In turn, they’ve traded batches, shared recipes, and joined thousands of others on a journey of creating healthy food for themselves, their families, and their communities. Katz’s work earned him the Craig Clairborne lifetime achievement award from the Southern Foodways Alliance, and has been called “one of the unlikely rock stars of the American food scene” by The New York Times.

This updated and revised edition, now with full color photos throughout, is sure to introduce a whole new generation to the flavors and health benefits of fermented foods. It features many brand-new recipes—including Strawberry Kvass, African Sorghum Beer, and Infinite Buckwheat Bread—and updates and refines original recipes reflecting the author’s ever-deepening knowledge of global food traditions that has influenced four-star chefs and home cooks alike. For Katz, his gateway to fermentation was sauerkraut. So open this book to find yours, and start a little food revolution right in your own kitchen.

Praise for Sandor Ellix Katz and his books:

“The Art of Fermentation is an extraordinary book, and an impressive work of passion and scholarship.”—Deborah Madison, author of Local Flavors

“Sandor Katz has proven himself to be the king of fermentation.”—Sally Fallon Morell, President, The Weston A. Price Foundation

“Sandor Katz has already awakened more people to the diversity and deliciousness of fermented foods than any other single person has over the last century.”—Gary Paul Nabhan, author of Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land

“The fermenting bible.” — Newsweek

“In a country almost clinically obsessed with sterilization Katz reminds us of the forgotten benefits of living in harmony with our microbial relatives.” — Grist

The New Wildcrafted Cuisine by Pascal Baudar

With detailed recipes for ferments, infusions, spices, and other preparations

Wild foods are increasingly popular, as evidenced by the number of new books about identifying plants and foraging ingredients, as well as those written by chefs about culinary creations that incorporate wild ingredients (Noma, Faviken, Quay, Manreza, et al.). The New Wildcrafted Cuisine, however, goes well beyond both of these genres to deeply explore the flavors of local terroir, combining the research and knowledge of plants and landscape that chefs often lack with the fascinating and innovative techniques of a master food preserver and self-described “culinary alchemist.”

Author Pascal Baudar views his home terrain of southern California (mountain, desert, chaparral, and seashore) as a culinary playground, full of wild plants and other edible and delicious foods (even insects) that once were gathered and used by native peoples but that have only recently begun to be re-explored and appreciated.

For instance, he uses various barks to make smoked vinegars, and combines ants, plants, and insect sugar to brew primitive beers. Stems of aromatic plants are used to make skewers. Selected rocks become grinding stones, griddles, or plates. Even fallen leaves and other natural materials from the forest floor can be utilized to impart a truly local flavor to meats and vegetables, one that captures and expresses the essence of season and place.

This beautifully photographed book offers up dozens of creative recipes and instructions for preparing a pantry full of preserved foods, including Pickled Acorns, White Sage-Lime Cider, Wild Kimchi Spice, Currant Capers, Infused Salts with Wild Herbs, Pine Needles Vinegar, and many more. And though the author’s own palette of wild foods are mostly common to southern California, readers everywhere can apply Baudar’s deep foraging wisdom and experience to explore their own bioregions and find an astonishing array of plants and other materials that can be used in their own kitchens.

The New Wildcrafted Cuisine is an extraordinary book by a passionate and committed student of nature, one that will inspire both chefs and adventurous eaters to get creative with their own local landscapes.

The Wildcrafting Brewer by Pascal Baudar

Primitive beers, country wines, herbal meads, natural sodas, and more

The art of brewing doesn’t stop at the usual ingredients: barley, hops, yeast, and water. In fact, the origins of brewing involve a whole galaxy of wild and cultivated plants, fruits, berries, and other natural materials, which were once used to make a whole spectrum of creative, fermented drinks.

Now fermentation fans and home brewers can rediscover these “primitive” drinks and their unique flavors in The Wildcrafting Brewer. Wild-plant expert and forager Pascal Baudar’s first book, The New Wildcrafted Cuisine, opened up a whole new world of possibilities for readers wishing to explore and capture the flavors of their local terroir. The Wildcrafting Brewer does the same for fermented drinks. Baudar reveals both the underlying philosophy and the practical techniques for making your own delicious concoctions, from simple wild sodas, to non-grape-based “country wines,” to primitive herbal beers, meads, and traditional ethnic ferments like tiswin and kvass.

The book opens with a retrospective of plant-based brewing and ancient beers. The author then goes on to describe both hot and cold brewing methods and provides lots of interesting recipes; mugwort beer, horehound beer, and manzanita cider are just a few of the many drinks represented. Baudar is quick to point out that these recipes serve mainly as a touchstone for readers, who can then use the information and techniques he provides to create their own brews, using their own local ingredients.

The Wildcrafting Brewer will attract herbalists, foragers, natural-foodies, and chefs alike with the author’s playful and relaxed philosophy. Readers will find themselves surprised by how easy making your own natural drinks can be, and will be inspired, again, by the abundance of nature all around them.