In the past the home kitchen provided a family with all its medicines and cosmetics as well as its food, wine, pickles and preserves. Our ancestors were resourceful and imaginative and very much in tune with nature; this book recaptures their harmonious, sustainable way of life by setting down for the modern reader all that knowledge and lore. There are recipes for soups, sauces, main dishes, salads, pickles, jams, sorbets, as well as teas, syrups and lotions.

Edible Wild Plants and Herbs is both a cookbook and field guide to the identification and use of foodstuffs from the wild. The book is exquisitely and lavishly illustrated with detailed full—colour paintings by Christabel King, chief botanical artist at Kew Gardens. They show in detail every plant and herb listed, and range from dandelion and sorrel to sea beet and samphire. There are almost 400 recipes covering nearly 100 different plant varieties and the illustrations, drawn from life by one of the country's leading botanical artists, show the edible parts of the plants at their peak time for picking. In addition there is a calendar indicating what plants to look for at each season of the year, information on where the plants are found and how to identify them.