A Dream of Wild Asparagus

First steps into foraging

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On a late March sunny afternoon, I was traveling with some friends, bouncing along the roughly six-mile road from the yoga center, where we all lived and worked, to the nearby town of Villamartin in the Cádiiz province of Spain. The rainy season deposited mud from the hills onto the road, and it looked as though it ought to be removed with a snowplow. My eyes were glued out the window, taking in the scenery, head bobbing each time the tire dipped into one of the road’s many holes and cracks. Halfway there, I noticed handfuls of people, dispersed on both sides and clearly not all traveling together, on what looked like an afternoon stroll. Except they kept bending over. 

“What are they doing?” I asked the car, and the world in general, my voice carrying out the open window.           

“Wild asparagus,” was the answer. “It grows everywhere here,” they said. 

“Did you say asparagus? ¡Digame!” 

Thus began my obsession with the wild relative of one of my favorite, and oftentimes pricey, vegetables. The common preparation in southern Spain came boiled first and then added to scrambled eggs. Yum. Back in the states, wild asparagus is abundant, and people use it the same way they’d use the larger, domesticated version. I wanted to find my own and began searching for places to look in my own backyard, Louisiana. 

I enlisted an old friend from university, whom I knew to be an outdoorsman with a summer side hustle in chanterelles and other local, lucrative delicacies. He learned from his uncle, who frequently brought him to pick mushrooms in City Park and at Honey Island Swamp. He said that most people he knows that are good at foraging have been doing it for generations, but newcomers aren’t categorically excluded. Like most things that are worthwhile, it simply takes time and effort. 

When foraging mushrooms, he goes out with a five-gallon bucket (the legal haul from public land), his cell phone for tagging spots on Google Maps, and a mushroom knife with a brush at the end of it. Chanterelles like black trumpets and oyster mushrooms are spring and summer favorites, but their growth depends heavily on moisture and temperature. He regularly goes out to look for edibles, and (to my disappointment) informed me that wild asparagus doesn’t sprout up around here. Fortunately, there is a comparable Southern plant called Smilax that can be grilled, served raw, sautéed, wrapped in bacon, or even scrambled with eggs. I reached out to Mississippian Joseph Hosey, the “Free State Forager,” to tell me more. 

Smilax, he explained, is an edible vine with young sprouts that are tender and nearly identical to asparagus. The lower part, he said, is harder, but as the weather warms, the plant grows little tendrils, which are his favorites. 

Hosey  picked up the moniker “Free State Forager “ from actor Sean Bridgers on the set of the 2016 film, The Free State of Jones, where Hosey had an extra-turned-minor-role. He’d brought Bridgers a hat full of chanterelles he had picked. Later, actor Matthew McConaughey followed suit, harvesting his own chanterelles along with other cast and crew members. Hosey’s main gig is as a forest inventory cruiser for a private forestry consultant company, where he works in the woods, locating and flagging property lines and doing inventory on standing timber. He began foraging after starting a family and wanting to bring healthier options to the table. He started with a garden but soon realized that healthier options were growing, without his hand, all over the place. 

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“Nature is a living calendar,” said Hosey, “You look for patterns,” he said, and you start with what you know, like blackberries, plums and crab apples. Once you start seeing the obvious, you can branch out as you begin to recognize plants like you would faces in town. He also suggests that newcomers start with wild water. “To forage your own water is the most important thing. It is the basis of life, and it is a good place to start if you are looking to bring food from the outside into the kitchen.” 

He is a fan of Smilax, often called greenbrier. A sign at his booth at the local farmers market reads “Treat me like asparagus.” Smilax, he explained, is an edible vine with young sprouts that are tender and nearly identical to asparagus. The lower part, he said, is harder, but as the weather warms, the plant grows little tendrils, which are his favorites. 

Chris Bennett, a forager, writer, cheesemonger, and trained chef, grew up roaming his family farm in Alabama. Today he lives with his girlfriend in Asheville, North Carolina, where he finds inspiration for his food through studies of time and place. The French have a longer tradition of foraging than we do, or at least a longer unbroken tradition, said Bennett. He spoke of one forager in particular, Michelle Bras, whose cookbook was a big catalyst for getting him interested in cooking. 

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Until recently, one of the main struggles for foragers in the South is that many valuable techniques have traditionally been passed down through families, but never written down. Most of the literature came from the Pacific Northwest, which Southern foragers then had to adapt to conditions here to understand, through trial and error, the timeline for growth in their local woods. It was Bennett who changed this. His first book, Southeast Foraging: 120 Wild & Flavorful Edibles from Angelica to Wild Plums, was published by Timber Press in 2015 and is now one of the ultimate guides to foraging in the Southern region. 

One of Bennett’s favorite foods in the Southern wild is honeysuckle. The flowers are edible, and something as simple as a honeysuckle syrup captures that aroma, time and place in the year. “It perfumes the whole air,” he said. “The smell of honeysuckle blooming is the smell of summer starting in the South.”  

Follow along with Joseph Hosey, @freestateforager on Facebook and Instagram.

Learn more about Chris Bennett at foragerman.com.