Wild kingdom?

One need not go far for a meal of undomesticated or uncultivated foods

One need not go far for a meal of undomesticated or uncultivated foods. (Illustration/Edel Rodriguez)

There are reasons that we say we love wild food: environmental concern, revulsion at industrial farming, appetite for untamed flavors. But wild certainly has an appeal beyond the rational, a charisma. Think "strawberries"; then think "wild strawberries."

A friend attributes the charisma to rootless Americans' longing for a place we've never actually been - the virgin wood, untrammeled plain, wilderness as Eden. And if we can't get there, we can at least eat the food.

In any case, "wild" has the attraction that, not so long ago, "farm" had - when we read "farm-fresh" and conjured green fields, red barn, white house, and sun-brown Midwesterners. Now we're inclined to imagine "agribusiness," a threatening gray.

Yes, there are foods available in our marketplaces that may with reasonable, if sometimes slippery, justification be called wild. However, many of them are not wild in the completely unfettered sense we may crave - they are managed by humans to a greater or lesser degree. Man is in the forest. Getting down to particulars helps explain the distinctions. So, from appetizer to dessert, we have imagined a meal of foods-called-wild that you might see around here in restaurants and markets, and explained what is wild and not so wild about them. (Granted, we have indulged in time-lapse gourmandizing. You would otherwise be waiting for months between your wild Maine shrimp and your wild Maine blueberries.)

Appetizer - Wild Maine Shrimp
A great many of the shrimp we eat are farmed - sometimes causing pollution of water and destruction of flora. They are also often from foreign sources - also to the detriment of the environment when you figure in transportation. Wild Maine shrimp, or Northern shrimp, have an undeniable wild pedigree: They're native, not farmed (no feeding, no antibiotics), are local to New Englanders and thus fresh, and tasty - sweet when raw, somehow yeasty when cooked. The US fishery is managed mainly by limits on season length, which changes according to stock assessments. An Environmental Defense Fund website rates them as pretty green - "eco-OK." They're virtual paragons of wild appeal. So why aren't they huge sellers? "Right now, there are more Northern shrimp than the market can handle," says Bradley Spear of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. At the retail level, Alan Wulf of Wulf's Fish Market in Brookline says, they sell only "pretty well" in comparison with other shrimp. "It is perplexing," says Spear; he notes that new markets for Northern shrimp have been slow to develop. Certainly, their thumbnail size makes them less desirable among fans of the giant fried shrimp that resemble breaded mittens.

Salad - Wild Arugula
Wild arugula is, as Chris Kurth of Siena Farms in Sudbury says, "a bit of a misnomer," as he orders the seed from a catalog and grows it in rows right along with regular arugula and other greens. Still, he praises the "spicier" taste of this arugula, also called sylvetta, a now widely cultivated variety that resembles plants still found growing wild in Italy.

Entree - Wild Boar
Here producers go to ingenious, international lengths to achieve the "wild" label. In restaurants and markets around here, you are probably getting some kind of European wild boar or descendant thereof. Some are raised like domestic pork, in close quarters. But there are more exacting producers. Ariane Daguin, owner of D'Artagnan, a supplier of meats and game, explains her company's approach: Russian black boars introduced into open Saskatchewan habitats are allowed to range freely, eat what they come upon, are not fed supplements, then are trapped and taken for inspection before being slaughtered. (Pre-mortem inspection is required by the US government.) The result is meat - dark, flavorful, close-grained, lean but tender - quite different from the pork bred and raised for the mainstream US market.

Entree - Pheasant
When it comes to this and other game birds, you will find only farmed specimens most of the year. Daguin says that D'Artagnan's pheasants are raised under 20-foot-high nets with a lot less elbow room than in the wild and given feed supplements. A US Department of Agriculture website says such "flight cages" are typically 130 feet long, 12 feet wide, and 6 1/2 feet high. Better digs than Tweety has, maybe, but certainly not the wild.

However, at the right time of year, you can get - fresh, not frozen - pheasant and other game birds that live most of their lives in the wild and are hunted there. Like wild boar, they carry a passport. In spring, a few weeks after hatching, the birds are released on large estates in Scotland. They are hunted by shooting parties in the fall and winter. Post-mortem inspection is legal there, and US authorities accept the British practice, as they do not for game from other countries. After a hunt, each shooter gets to take home a brace of birds, and the rest go to businesses such as D'Artagnan and Scottish Wild Harvest, which imports Scottish game and langoustines.

There is no end of debate when it comes to the taste of farmed meat versus wild. Andrew Hamilton, the owner of Scottish Wild Harvest, not surprisingly praises his wild birds' superiority of flavor. Rick Thompson, an owner of Cavendish Game Birds in Springfield, Vt., notes that his birds, though farmed, forage on natural ground cover, which contributes to taste. Cavendish gets requests to supply birds with the viscera intact, giving the flesh a flavor that Thompson calls "livery," and many others would call gamy. An acquaintance who has eaten a variety of hunted game endorses the widespread thought that there is an underlying quality of flavor marking wild fare from dove to raccoon. He and others describe this tang as "strong," "richer" than domestic, "heavier," "tobacco-y," "earthy," even "dirty." Having described it, they then caution that it is hard to describe, sui generis, elusive - all of which sounds quite wild, doesn't it?

Garnish - Wild Leeks (Ramps), Fiddleheads, Wild Morels
Flavor descriptions of wild plants also tend to the expansive. Kurth, the Sudbury grower, praising his favorite springtime wild plant, stinging nettle, notes its bright-green color and says, "That's exactly how it tastes." Enthusiasts of ramps refer to them as the King of Stink. Benjamin Maleson, a longtime mushroom forager who lives in Jamaica Plain, calls wild morels nearly indescribable, then contributes "woodsy," before swinging into Zen koan: Morels taste like "gamy meat - but I'm vegetarian, so what do I know?"

As you taste for yourself, and you can soon, with spring advancing, keep in mind that our melange of ramps, fiddleheads, and morels is the wildest part of the meal. Yes, the veggies. They are not propagated by humans, are natives of their range, grow in unworked forests and wetlands, are not cultivated, are harvested by hand. Unhusbanded and enduring, they are far wilder than, say, farmed venison.

Tony Russo of A. Russo & Sons in Watertown buys many of his fiddleheads, the young coiled leaves of ostrich ferns, directly from foragers; early in the season, they come from the Connecticut River Valley, and later from Vermont and Maine. Tom and Edie Sisson of Concord, who supply Siena Farms, take fiddleheads mostly from their property in Maine. Tom says that most patches, many along riverbanks, are well known by locals, who know "when and where to go." Pressed for a description, Edie says fiddleheads taste "exactly like fiddleheads" and, alluding dryly to famed forager Euell Gibbons, not much like wild asparagus.

Leobardo Mondragon of Petersham grows shiitake and oyster mushrooms but forages morels and a number of other wild varieties. He works old forests - many mushrooms grow in symbiosis with particular tree species - in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and sells some of what he finds through Siena Farms. Maleson, who sells to restaurants, says mountains are great places to find mushrooms, but he also forages in town; experience has taught him "every little niche where they might grow."

Russo's gets 90 percent of its ramps from West Virginia, where the wild leeks have long been a part of the Appalachian heritage. Jeanine Davis, an associate professor at North Carolina State University involved in sustainable agriculture, says that in the southern Appalachians, ramp diggers include people who have done it all their lives and newer folks who are conscious participants in the wild food movement. In some places, harvesting is so heavy that diggers are moving "deeper and deeper into the woods."

Dessert - Wild Maine Blueberries
These are native stands of low-bush blueberries cannily managed by their keepers. Their very identity as "wild" was a deliberate decision, according to David Bell, executive director of the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine, adopted to increase their appeal and sales. That doesn't mean it's a cheat. The bushes are wild "because we have not planted them or genetically improved them," not even by old-fashioned, pre-GMO plant breeding. (The high-bush blueberry is also native to Maine, but it is usually more intensely cultivated.) They are pruned or burned over every two years, for optimum fruiting. There is some pest management. The wild berries' smaller size, says Bell, means more intense flavor because there is a higher skin-to-pulp ratio, and the skin is where flavor is concentrated. And the plants' genetic diversity makes for a "medley of flavors" from tart to sweet.

They sound like they'd be perfect with a little whipped cream. Now if we could just find a wild cow.