Foraged Feasts
- Kelly McManus
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
By Kelly McManus April 1, 2025
Warning: You would have to be nuts to eat anything I tell you about in this blog. Trust me— I know this from personal experience.
My parents Pat and Bun were impoverished children of the Great Depression and spent their teen years with the food shortages and rationings of World War 2. Coming from this background, they did not take the availability of food for granted. As a boy, Dad had helped supplement his family’s meager food supply with his hunting and fishing. Still, with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the escalation of the Cold War throughout the 60’s, Mom decided even he had to up his survival game.
Dad and Mom leapt into the burgeoning wild food movement dragging their hapless children behind them. Mom was the primary instigator, although she was a relative newbie to the field. Even as a Montana native, the only wild food she was familiar with was huckleberries and she was an avid picker. But unfortunately for us, as we kids soon found out, you cannot live on huckleberries alone.
She might have been inexperienced in wild foods, but Mom was a research wonder. Always a voracious reader, she tore through all the foraging books she could find. Meanwhile Dad continued putting groceries on the table with his freelance work as a photojournalist while teaching English at the local college.
Finally Bun’s foraging master plan was ready to launch. There was only one teensy problem. Bun did not drive. As always, though, Dad had her back. Besides, he never turned down an excuse to go wandering through woods, deserts, swamps, and any other god-forsaken place you could imagine. And, frankly neither did the three, young McManus girls.
Nevertheless, we were still skeptical about this whole wild food scheme our parents were cooking up. But after numerous nuclear bomb drills climbing under our desks at school, we had begun to appreciate our parents’ concerns and it was taking a toll on our own sense of security. It did not help that an indiscreet teacher had been heard to say to a colleague that these desk drills were a waste of time. Laughing sardonically, she said since we were so close to an Air Force base that was considered a prime Russian target, we’d all be vaporized immediately—desks or not. What?! We much preferred Mom’s more optimistic view that only the supermarkets would be vaporized. Suddenly we all were enthusiastically on-board and gungho about foraging for our meals. It would be fun or so we thought before we actually had to eat anything.
So on that happy note, the little, but determined McManus family set out on our quest to survive a nuclear holocaust. Mom’s wild food bible in those days was Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons, so, of course, finding some wild asparagus was our first objective. I don’t remember much about many of our early food forays, but I do remember that finding and eating the rare wild asparagus was our first and most delicious success.
A few days later, my sister Shannon and I in our roamings around the fields near our home were suprised to find a huge patch of asparagus by some deserted railroad tracks. We greedily harvested every spear we could find and took our bounty home to be deliciously prepared by our mom. For once, there was enough of this wild delicacy that we would be able to eat our fill. Unfortunately our first bites told us the sorry truth. Our delicacy tasted, at best, like tar and at worst like some horrible chemical experiment cooked up by the railroads to destroy every living thing within 10 feet of their tracks—except our mutant wild asparagus. We had learned our first wild food gathering lesson: location, location, location.
The next stop on our food foraging journey was weeds. After collecting and ingesting various and assorted exotic greenery, our favorite weed was the lowly and plentiful dandelion that grew in abundance in our back yard. All of us enjoyed the boiled young leaves, but Mom’s growing reputation as an outdoor cook reached new heights in the adult population when she turned a huge tub full of the yellow blossoms into dandelion wine. This success inspired her to turn pretty much anything else we found or had in abundance into wine. Her failures as a winemaker were epic until she lit upon rhubarb wine which even I appproved of. Technically rhubarb isn’t wild, but hey—it grew in the same overgrown weed patch we called a backyard at our rental house as the so-called “wild” dandelions. Close enough. Back in those days, no one came to our house without being offered a glass of rubarb wine and her fame as an outdoor cook began to rise.
Bun’s next wild culinary success occurred when Dad took us to some remote mountainside and we picked bushels of wild elderberry blossoms under Mom’s directions. On reaching home, we shook most of the bugs out of our flowery treasure trove and Mom made a huge pile of elderberry blossom fritters. I’ve never forgotten how delicious they were even though it’s been 50 years since we devoured them.
Our enjoyment was only slightly damped by the occasional deep-fried bug and Mom’s musing through her foraging books while we ate only to discover that only the blue or black elderberries were safe. The red ones are toxic as are the entire rest of the elderberry plant of any color, including the stems. Hmm, does that include the little stems that connect all the flowers on the blossoms? And how the heck do we know what color the berries would be on this wild bush we’d never seen before? Time would tell, Mom said stoically.
We all survived with only a fond memory of a delicious wild treat. And our survival gave Mom the confidence to make a huge batch of elderberry blossom wine. It never was as popular as her rhubarb wine, probably because our guests noticed that Mom and Dad cautiously chose not to imbibe with them.
Dad also taught us everything he knew from his childhood about gathering wild berries and mushrooms. We spent our springs, summers, and autumns roaming the wilderness picking buckets of both. It really was an idyllic life for a kid. Our old standby mushrooms were morels, shaggy manes, and chantrelles. We could identify those with our eyes closed, although that was frowned upon. There were other mushrooms we tried with much trepidation just from following mushroom books, but Dad decided it was too risky and we needed professional help before we got any more adventurous picking fungi. By this time we had moved back to Pullman, WA, so Dad could get his PhD in English. On the university grapevine, he heard of a mushroom group led by a WSU mycology professor and he signed up the whole family for the next outing.
We all loved our mushrooming field trip with these dedicated foragers. It was all very informative. After a hard day of picking a huge variety of delicious, previously unknown mushrooms, we sat down with the group to enjoy a mushroom banquet they prepared. Unfortunately, though, the only real impact for me of this educational experience came during our lunch break.
I was happily munching my peanut butter and jelly sandwich alongside the elderly woman who was assigned to be my mushrooming mentor that day. She entertained me with the tale of a friend of hers who had died while eating her own peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a foraging trip just like this one. My ears perked up. Apparently the poor woman had barely touched a deadly poisonous amanita mushroom earlier in the day and then had eaten her lunch without washing her hands. Well, that was it for her…and me. So much for knowledge. I’ve only picked morels, shaggy manes, and chantrelles ever since. And I obsessively wash my hands!
As you’ve surely surmised, we all survived the 1960’s with its fears of nuclear holocaust. And perhaps more remarkably, we survived Bun’s heroic quest to save us from starvation by feeding us wild foods she knew little about. Most were tolerated, but not loved. Some were inedible. And a few were astonishly delicious. We still pick huckleberries every summer and tramp around the woods every spring searching for morels, but that’s about the extent of our foraging these days. As Mom and Dad grew too old to traipse through the woods in search of wild delights, Peggy and I would surprise them with little gifts of morels to cook up with their scrambled eggs or show up for Christmas breakfast with everything needed to make them a spectacular huckleberry pancake breakfast. And as we enjoyed the remnant of our past foraged meals together, our thoughts and talk always returned to the joys of wandering through the countryside as a little family in search of our next great meal.
Pat's Quote of the Month
It was against his principle, he only had one, to ever be caught more than an hour's distance away from a food supply.
— A Fine and Pleasant Misery 1978
McManus Recipe of the Month
When it came to cooking, Mom was an expert at making do with whatever she could find to feed our family. For example, bacon grease was saved from the rare breakfast when bacon was served, and later used as a flavoring or to grease frying pans.
Mom kept her bacon grease in a lidded aluminum pot that had a strainer to catch wayward bacon crumbs as the hot grease was poured into it. We called it a grease pot and if ever it became too full, Mom used the excess to bake up a batch of Hard Time Cookies, which called for bacon grease as the main ingredient. We thought they were delicious.
The proper way to eat this type of cookie was to put it up to your mouth and suck out the bacon grease before consuming the rest of the cookie. On second thought, maybe it wasn't "proper", but it was the McManus way.
Decades later, our parents hosted a dinner where each McManus daughter was asked to bring a favorite food from childhood. Kelly brought Hard Time Cookies. By now we all thought the idea of sucking bacon grease out of a cookie sounded disgusting so Kelly went home that night with all but the few cookies we dared our kids to suck on.
Now we're daring you. Are you brave enough to try Bun's Hard Time Cookies?
Pat's Yarns
Dad's favorite day of the year was April 1, the only day he could get away with his shenanigans! Or could he? Find out in Once Again, The Joke's On Me.
Vintage Bun
Take a look back at spring time through the eyes of Bun in Bloomsday and Other April Traditions.
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