Foraging in Eastern Europe: Wild edible plants in Polish traditional cuisine

This book provides an overview of what wild plants have been eaten in Poland for the last two hundred years. It gives an account of which species were eaten by peasants in everyday life but also describes famine plants used in times of emergency. It also includes some traditional cooking recipes. The information in this book is based on 20 years of research in archives in ethnographic institutions all over Poland. This monograph can be used both by those interested in the history of food as well as ordinary foragers who can find inspiration learning about little-used plants. The book also contains several traditional Polish recipes using wild plants. Lukasz Luczaj is an ethnobotanist who has spent his life travelling around the world documenting foraging practices, e.g. in Poland, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania, Georgia, China and Laos. Lukasz is associate professor at the University of Rzeszow, Poland. In 2018 he was invited to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, to deliver the annual Distinguished Ethnobotanist lecture about his research on foraging. He has published nearly a hundred ethnobotanical articles and is the author of a few books. He runs a foraging school in the Polish Carpathians. He also ‘travels in time’ by looking at the history of foraging – reaching for unknown descriptions of nineteenth-century rural life in Europe. In this book he writes about his home country's cuisine.