Edible Wild Herbs is an excellent book dedicated to discovering all these plants that can be found in nature and that can be used for food. . The book by Riccardo Luciano and Carlo Gatti is now a classic, and has reached a revised and integrated new edition. offers a comprehensive overview of herbs to eat in Italy.
The beginning of the book is simple: after a few introductory pages, including the one signed by Laura Colombo who supervised all the works, we started with the leaves of the plant , divided into three chapters. The first and most corpulent is dedicated to edible herbs followed by aromatic herbs and finally a summary of the fruits of wild trees . The distribution between the first two groups is not always very clear, for example, sage is not part of the aromas, but the classifications are often debatable.
Each floor is entitled to two pages , which contain characteristics, habitat, properties and use in the kitchen. But above all for each species there are color photos, which occupy (for good reason!) more than half of the space on the pages. The imaging device is indeed a great strength for this position, in a subject like this, it is certainly not a secondary factor. The sheets are very concise but the texts do their job, presenting the different species to the reader without too much embellishment. Therefore, we learn about botanical characteristics, habitat, pharmaceutical properties and use in cooking. The dedicated habitat nose would definitely have been the most useful for those looking for herbs, unfortunately it’s usually a bit too synthetic.
At the end of the book, we find little more than 50 recipes , expressed in extreme synthesis and without images. These are certainly not the heart of the book, but they are useful as tips on how to improve different herbs. The recipes are numbered and the card for each plant indicates the numbers of the recipes that use it. It concludes, in addition to the index, a glossary of the most botanical terms.
Ultimately, the book is recommended to anyone who is curious about the plants around us and also about their possible culinary use. A text very similar to this and just as valid is Spontaneous edible plants while wild herbs de Mondo and Del Principe leaves more room for the use of plants in various culinary preparations, but has slightly penalized $0027 for photos in size $0027. However, there are three valid texts about wild herbs .
Where to buy this book
Edible Wild Herbs, in its new integrated version, is a book published by arabAFenice, it can be searched or ordered in a physical library, but it can also be found online: on Amazon or Macrolibrarsi. Personally, I recommend the second store, which is an Italian reality attentive to eco-sustainability and as reliable as Amazon, although the multinational online store is unbeatable for the speed of service. Either way, I recommend visiting the Amazon link, as it lets you read an excerpt from the beginning of the book, giving you the opportunity to understand how the individual herb charts are structured.
book highlights
- Many very clear photos useful for easy recognition.
- Many species on the list .