So much emphasis in 2008 has been placed on "keeping it local" when it comes to food — shopping at farmers markets and growing co-op vegetable gardens.
For local chefs, this is not a new concept; many have their own herb gardens and buy from area farms, as they have for years. Some take it a step further and explore North Shore woodlands, foraging for fresh ingredients to create signature dishes.
Here are two chefs and one naturalist-author who have been searching the woods for years and including their bounty in recipes.
ALEC MAXON
NEWBURY
Alec Maxon, the executive chef and pastry chef at Aquatini restaurant in downtown Newburyport, forages for wild blackberries, elderberries and elder flowers, which he uses in jams, desserts and cocktails.
He is also confident enough to search for and eat wild mushrooms, traveling to Gloucester for porcinis and the White Mountains of New Hampshire for matsutake. In the Berkshires, he looks for the finest morels as well as wild onions and fiddleheads.
"I personally consume about 60 to 70 species of mushrooms," said Maxon, who also collects and sells 15 to 20 market species.
Maxon, who found his inspiration for cooking while traveling through Italy, also digs for clams in Newbury and is an avid fisherman who has spent part of the last seven years aboard local lobster, tuna and other commercial fishing boats.
Fettuccine ai fungi
Ingredients
1 small onion, diced
1 stick butter
1 tablespoon parsley and/or thyme
1 pound wild mushrooms, like chanterelles, porcini or shiitake, sliced
Salt and white pepper, to taste
1 pound homemade fettuccine, fresh fettuccine, or dried egg fettuccine
Freshly grated cheese, Parmigiano, grana or aged cheddar.
Directions
Bring a large pot of salted water (not as salty as the ocean) to a boil
Heat a large, heavy skillet (like a 12-inch cast iron). Add butter, onions and herbs, and stir for one minute. Add mushrooms and cook on high for five minutes, stirring as needed.
Take off heat. Cook pasta in salted water at a full boil until a little more tender than al dente. Save a cup or so of the pasta water. Drain the pasta and combine with the well-seasoned mushrooms, adding a little pasta water if it seems dry. Top with high-quality grated cheese.
Makes four to six servings.
— Alec Maxon
RYAN REDMOND
MARBLEHEAD
Ryan Redmond got his start foraging for berries with his grandmother, who lived in New York, on the Pennsylvania border. The Minnesota native brought his penchant for scouring the woods for ingredients to the North Shore when he took a job as a humanities teacher at the Charter School in Marblehead.
In addition to teaching, Redmond — who has been cooking for "as long as I can remember" and has a one-year professional chef's degree from the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts — recently started a small catering business, Field to Fork, where he forages and includes his finds in dishes he makes for small, in-home parties.
"I think it really is kind of neat to include that stuff (in recipes) that we just walk by and don't give a second thought to," said Redmond, who added he has a "real intellectual interest in food and the culture around food and not just the culinary techniques."
Foraging, Redmond said, is a way of bringing him to his food, literally, and "making that connection that I think is too frequently broken."
Balsamic Vinegar-Marinated Wild Blackberries
with Chantilly Cream
Ingredients
1 cup blackberries
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
2 teaspoons granulated sugar
1 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
Lemon zest from one-quarter lemon
Directions
To prepare the blackberries, combine the balsamic vinegar and sugar in a small bowl. Mix well until the sugar has dissolved. Add the blackberries. Gently stir to coat them with the vinegar-sugar mixture. Let the mixture sit for 20 minutes at room temperature.
To make the Chantilly cream, which is just sweetened whipped cream, in a decent-sized glass or metal mixing bowl, whisk the cream until it begins to thicken. Then add the sugar, the vanilla and the lemon zest. Continue whisking the cream until it thickens and, when the whisk is pulled away, it forms stiff peaks.
Plating
Redmond said you can arrange these to your liking, but he prefers to place a large spoonful of the Chantilly cream on a plate or in a shallow bowl next to a spoonful of the marinated blackberries. A drizzle of the marinade adds a nice touch, as does a sprig of mint tucked under the Chantilly cream.
Makes two servings.
— Ryan Redmond
RUSS COHEN,
ARLINGTON
Although Russ Cohen lives in Arlington, he holds a special place in his heart for the North Shore, where he married his wife, Ellen, on Steep Hill Beach in Ipswich in 1996.
You could say the area holds a special place in his stomach, too.
"The North Shore's absolutely one of my favorite foraging locations, because it's got really good-sized crops of my favorite edibles," said Cohen, the author of "Wild Plants I Have Known ... and Eaten" (1996, Essex County Greenbelt), a guidebook that focuses on edible plants that can easily be found throughout Essex County and most of New England.
Cohen's book also provides tips and information related to foraging and includes recipes. (He refers to himself as a "cook" — not a chef.)
A rivers advocate in the Massachusetts Riverways Program of the Mass. Department of Fish and Game, Cohen said he finds time to forage before and after his shifts. He's been considered an expert in the field for years and offers walks and courses on wild plants and mushrooms.
"I've been doing this since 1970," he said. "And I've been eating local for decades, and now it's a new sort of fad."
He has a simple rule for safely picking plants: "Don't eat stuff that tastes bad."
But mushrooms are a different story.
Cohen's experience level allows him to safely pick wild mushrooms, but he advises against this for beginners or even novice foragers.
"(Picking mushrooms) requires a higher level of skills than just edible wild plants," he said. "You can have this delicious mushroom and be dead a day later. The risk is much greater than for other plants."
To learn about mushrooms, Cohen advised taking a class with him or going on a foray sponsored by Boston Mycological Club (www.bostonmycologicalclub.org).
A safer bet would be to collect nuts from shagbark hickory trees, which line the roadsides in Essex County. Cohen makes a recipe similar to pecan pie, which he substitutes with hickory nuts.
"It's like a New-England version of pecan pie," he said.
Maple hickory-nut pie
Pie crust
1 cup flour
1âÑ2 teaspoon salt
1âÑ8 cup (2 tablespoons) cold milk
1âÑ4 cup vegetable (canola, safflower, corn or soybean) oil.
Directions
Sift together flour and salt into a bowl.
Pour milk and vegetable oil into a measuring cup, but do not stir. Add this liquid to the flour and mix it well with a fork.
Dampen a tabletop counter with a sponge and smooth a 12-inch square of wax paper on the dampened area. Slightly flatten the dough in the center of the wax paper and then cover with another piece of wax paper the same size as the first.
Roll the dough between the pieces of wax paper until it reaches the edges and it will be just the right thickness and size for a 9- to 10-inch diameter plate.
Peel off the top paper, turn the dough sheet over into the pie pan, then carefully remove the remaining piece of waxed paper from the top.
Filling
3 eggs
7âÑ8 cup maple sugar
1âÑ2 teaspoon salt
1 cup light corn syrup
1âÑ3 cup melted butter
1 1âÑ2- to 2 cups hickory nuts (no need to chop; large pieces are good for this recipe)
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Beat eggs slightly, then add maple sugar, salt, corn syrup and melted butter, and beat thoroughly.
Stir in the hickory nuts, then pour into the unbaked pastry shell.
Bake for 45 minutes; cool before serving.
— Russ Cohen
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For more information on these foragers, visit www.chefryan.org, http://users.rcn.com/eatwild/sched.htm or www.aquatini.com.
