that.
I am not a professional forager. There are people who do really great work in that realm—many right here in my own city. “Wildman” Steve Brill, Marie Viljeon, Ava Chin are among my favorites (each of whom has a terrific book or two, and I highly recommend you pick them up). I am, if anything, a cocktail tinkerer and abundantly enthusiastic home cook—and this is how I implore you to approach this topic, too. Use this book for inspiration. Be curious. There is nothing more rewarding than using your imagination and integrating a forlorn piece of flora into a glorious gastronomic bit of sipping pleasure. Be careful, too: the plants I list here are all pretty safe bets; turn to the pros like those listed above or other foraging tomes for your area before ingesting something with which you are unfamiliar. Plants, berries, and mushrooms can be a boon to your cocktail shaker, but they can also be poisonous if you mistakenly opt for an unfriendly look-alike to the thing you really wanted. Curiosity and caution are your two best friends.
Don’t ignore the more domesticated side of fresh ingredients, either: your pots of herbs, your prized summer tomato garden, a funny tuft of leafy greens at your local farmers’ market that you have never seen or used before. Challenge yourself. What’s the worst thing that can happen—you make a bad drink? You’ll make a better one next time. The great thing about booze? Unlike the fresh ingredients I encourage you to incorporate here, its shelf life is fairly indefinite.
Be brave, be curious, get your hands dirty, and by all means do me the honor of having fun with this book. May you never look at weeds the same way again!
I happen to be a little impartial about spring for selfish reasons—my birthday falls on the first day of it. That’s sort of the point of the season, right? Things coming to life; each tree bud and crocus shoot an awakening, as if the world were opening its eyes, giving a big yawn and stretch, and saying, “Hey, what are we going to do today?” The possibilities are open and endless. That’s what spring feels like in the botanical world: one big possibility. Maybe dandelions don’t have to be treated as weeds. Maybe those wild onion shoots don’t need to be mowed over but instead pulled from the ground and given a whole new purpose. And those early, curling fern bits? Oh, there’s a lot you can do with those. True foragers see the spring season through a wide-angle lens that for the rest of us is a mere pinhole. But the great thing about spring? We get the chance to start all over again and discover things we never knew existed. I’m still learning; I hope this chapter encourages you to shake up a little curiosity for what’s around you, too.
No other plant better represents the battle between the human desire for a perfect landscape and complete weedy chaos than the dandelion. Their craggy leaves and long-stemmed golden flowers shoot from the ground in complete defiance of suburban aesthetics, like a plant revolution that will never say die. But the thing about dandelions? They’re delicious! Instead of seeing them as the ultimate insolent maverick, see them as a generous source of side dishes and, for our purposes, cocktail ingredients. You can use the lovely chive flower for this recipe, too.
1½ ounces (45ml) bourbon
1 pickled dandelion or chive flower*
Pour the whiskey into a shot glass. Top with a pickled flower. Shoot the contents.
*Pickled Dandelions or Chive Flowers
1 cup (roughly 100g) dandelion or chive flowers,
gently rinsed and allowed to dry thoroughly
1 quart (approx. 1 liter) white wine vinegar
Add the clean, dry flowers to a quart-sized (1-liter) mason jar. Fill with vinegar. Place in a cool, dark place for 5 to 7 days.
When I was a kid playing in the backyard, I used to like to grab the skinny, green, scallionlike stalks of wild spring onions from the ground and pry them free. Then I cut off the tops, plopped the the onion bulbs into my doll’s supermarket cart, and let them have some real, live produce, not the plastic stuff they came with. That’s still how I feel about these onions—why buy some unknown supermarket source of cocktail garnish when I’ve got fresh, perfectly sized, beautiful, gimlet-ready onions right in my own backyard? Go dig up some onions, and make this easy-peasy cocktail accoutrement.
2½ ounces (75ml) London dry gin
½ ounce (15ml) dry vermouth
1 pickled wild spring onion*
Fill a mixing glass half-full with ice cubes. Pour in the gin and vermouth. Stir for 30 to 45 seconds. Strain into a coupe or cocktail glass, and garnish with a pickled wild spring onion.
*Pickled Wild Spring Onions
6–12 wild onions, washed, leaving just a little green tail
1½ cups (355ml) white wine vinegar
½ cup (120ml) water
1 tablespoon (15g) sugar
1 teaspoon (5g) kosher salt
1 sprig of dill
1 teaspoon (5g) juniper berries
1 teaspoon (5g) black peppercorns
Add the onions (I like to leave a little tail on them), vinegar, water, sugar, and salt to a pot and simmer for about 2 minutes. Allow to cool. Drop the dill, juniper berries, and peppercorns in a 16-ounce (475ml) mason jar and pour in the vinegar solution and onions. Store in the sealed jar in the refrigerator for up to 6 months.
Wild onions © Alamy
Black locust trees in the spring are some of the most beautiful examples of the season—and the most prolific. They’re everywhere in North America and Europe, even if you haven’t noticed them before. This normally humble, craggy-bark tree busts out with tumbling bouquets of blossoms, white-petaled and pinkish at the bottom. The best part: they are edible and both mild and gently sweet. It’s the way things should taste in spring. Like any flower, edible locust blossoms are fleeting, which is why I like embellishing something sparkling with them. There’s an urgency to sparkling wine—the bubbles rising quickly as if they can’t fly to the top fast enough. It’s the ultimate
