The weeds of the field and garden are free to anyone and they contain any amount of dietary goodness. What is really needed is a set of recipes to turn them into everybody's favorite supper. "Cooking Weeds" succeeds in doing just that with a collection of recipes for vegetarian dishes that possess a defiantly modern slant.

The weeds of the field and garden have two big advantages in the kitchen: firstly, they are free to anyone; secondly, they contain any amount of dietary goodness, often not so readily available from the anemic products of the hothouse and intensive farm. And what is really needed is a set of recipes to turn them into everybody's favorite supper. This, Vivien Weise succeeds in doing. With plenty of clear illustrations of the plants in question Vivien has created a series of vegetarian dishes with a defiantly modern slant: comfrey hamburgers, daisy ginger soup, dandelion salad with a banana yogurt sauce, dead nettle eggplant spread, ground elder layered pancakes, and many more. In the popular weed-cookery courses that Weise gives, she demonstrates the culinary value of upwards of a hundred different plants. The value of weeds is a given in Mediterranean countries where wild-plant salads are commonplace. It was also understood by our own ancestors who recognized that many of these plants--now derided as pests--might actually taste nice and that they also had a great therapeutic value: the lesser celandine, for instance, was a particular remedy for scurvy; the dandelion is a diuretic. They also have very high vitamin, mineral and protein content, especially in comparison with cultivated vegetables.