Wild Flavors

Published by Chelsea Green

When Didi Emmons stepped onto Eva Sommaripa’s Massachusetts farm, she knew she had set foot in paradise. The Boston-based chef found more than 200 types of unusual herbs, greens and edible weeds — a bounty that would revolutionize her cooking. But on top of these fresh ingredients, Emmons also discovered a more sustainable way of life that starkly contrasted with the city living she was accustomed to.

In her most recent book, Wild Flavors: One Chef’s Transformative Year Cooking from Eva’s Farm, Emmons shares the culinary and environmental practices she learned from Sommaripa over the past ten years. While billed as a cookbook — Wild Flavors boasts 150 tasty recipes, such as rhubarb-raisin chutney, four-allium risotto with sea scallops, roasted parsnip soup and cod potato leek gratin — Emmons’ work is much more than that. It also showcases many of the exotic plants growing on the farm, offers tips on how to reduce waste, compost and recycle, and recounts stories of the friends and community who give life to Sommaripa’s garden.

In Emmons’ portrayal, Sommaripa is a quirky but principled food lover who abhors the excesses of consumer culture. Sommaripa hasn’t visited a grocery store in decades, stocks her kitchen with used restaurant equipment, has only two cereal box-sized trashcans in her house, and even saves twisty ties to avoid creating unnecessary waste.

So in keeping with Sommaripa’s spirit, the avoidance of waste — particularly from food — becomes a recurring theme throughout Wild Flavors. “At industrial farms, the seeds, flowers, roots, buds, and stems of vegetables and leafy greens are left by the wayside,” Emmons writes. “Eva teaches us to not be afraid to try eating a plant in a new way, and to use every part of the plant.”

Sommaripa eats plants alongside their growing cycle to maximize their utility. For instance, in late summer she uses chive flowers as seasoning; in early fall the plant’s berries are added to sauces and mashed potatoes; later, seeds from the dry berries become another form of seasoning; and in late fall, she harvests the fleshy onion greens that are found in grocery stores.

“When you grow food, you realize how much work it is, how much energy and resources go into it,” Sommaripa remarked. “If you don’t grow food, you have no concept.”

Author, Didi Emmons

Emmons also recounts being shocked to see Sommaripa eating an apple — the entire apple, core, seeds and all. But this moment showed Emmons how much food she was throwing away everyday. “I am opening up to parts of plants that I previously considered inedible,” she writes. “The stem end of the carrot, the stump of a lettuce, the rind on some cheese, the core of cabbage or fennel, the stems of kale or collards, bruised fruit, aging veggies, orange rinds, sweet potato skins, asparagus ends, and so on…”

Emmons incorporates this philosophy into her recipes, so alongside instructions for wild rice, arugula leaves, and parsley salad, she also explains that arugula flowers are a “handsome and righteous-tasting flower that can be “scatter[ed] on salads, soups, and other savory foods.”

The recipes are also organized seasonally to encourage fresh and local eating, and to preface each recipe, Emmons details how to avoid spoilage through proper storage and preservation of the plants featured in her dishes: herbs can be dried or made into delicious butters; arugula should not be washed before storage; beets can be buried outside through the winter; and autumn olives should be refrigerated on the branch.

But Sommaripa can even find a use for food that has gone bad, Emmons explains. When autumn comes, she collects bruised and rotten tomatoes that have fallen off the vine and extracts tomato water, a sweet clear juice inside the fruit, that can be added to soups or stews.

In the end, this cookbook is more about cultivating a certain way of looking at food than it is about specific recipes. Emmons skillfully conveys the beauty of the plants she cooks — and ultimately, her love for them — leaving the reader with her same admiration for produce. “Cilantro acts like the tambourine in a band, giving a dish some much-needed pep and pizzazz, much like a lemon or lime can,” she writes. “In the summer a few cilantro sprigs elevate even the simplest of salads.”

It is this deep adoration that drives the aversion to waste and consumer culture. Of course not everyone can replicate Sommaripa’s lifestyle, but Emmons’ graceful portrayal of the septuagenarian farmer acts like a mirror to our own environmental shortcomings, while also offering an appealing ideal to aspire to.

“Over the course of ten years, Eva and her garden transformed not only my cooking but also how I live,” Emmons writes. And after absorbing Wild Flavors, readers will find that Emmons has in turn transformed them.