A long time ago when I was just out of college, in love with food and cooking, and poor as a churchmouse, I decided to search for and harvest wild rice (Zizania aquatica) on the Sudbury, Concord, and Assabet Rivers. (click on photo for larger view)

It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Since my early teens, I had had a strange but unshakable interest in wild plants for food and medicine -- one which persists to this day. For years, I gathered many delicious and helpful leaves, fruits, seeds, stems, flowers, and roots from plants ignored by others or even considered nasty weeds. All summer long, I had seen wild rice growing and flowering and I knew just where to harvest it. I had read several sources on the timing and methodology for gathering, drying, threshing and winnowing: I was all set. This would be one more notch in my wild forager's belt, and a fun excuse to get into a canoe and play on our rivers.

And wild rice was at that time available at great price, as it was still mainly collected in the wild. It was yet to be commercially cultivated on the type of scale it is now, which has since greatly driven the price down. So, collecting wild rice from the rivers didn't seem the least bit odd to me: just downright sensible and a free treat at that. Euell Gibbons' "Stalking the Wild Asparagus" would be my guide on this journey.

Like I said: it seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Some friends and I rented a canoe at South Bridge Boathouse and paddled along to Egg Rock, where at that time a good stand of wild rice grew. (Now, the water levels and other factors have changed and it no longer is found much if at all at that spot.) Like the Native Americans I had read about (as depicted in the painting here), I thwacked the tops of the long canes over the edge of the boat, and all the ripe seed (wild rice is really a seed, not a grain) bounced and tinkled its way into the floor of the canoe. And then I learned my first lesson: MAKE SURE THE BOTTOM OF THE CANOE IS KEPT CLEAN AND DRY. It had never occurred to me. This was the first sign of the complications to come.

We did manage to return to the boathouse without further incident, lulling me into what turned out to be a false sense of optimism. I took our cache home for the next steps: air drying and then parching in a hot oven for an hour or more. Euell made no mention how awful and smokey this would smell. Or how persistent the odor would be. Mr. Gibbons: you had been so helpful in the past and then you failed me!

"After parching, the husk can be loosened by pounding or rubbing through the hands, and the trash winnowed out," quoth Euell. HA! There were little prickly, sticky parts all along the husks and they HURT. Rub and pound as I might, the darn husks would NOT separate from the treasure therein (I suspect I had harvested slightly underripe seed). It was a long, drawn-out chore and I spent much of a long weekend devoted to it.

Winnowing out the trash sounds easy. It probably IS easy. You toss up handfuls (or, on a larger scale, spade-fulls) of the grain/hull mix and the wind carries away the latter since it is lighter, leaving the former to fall back down into your collection bin.

But you have to have a windy day. For some insane reason I was trying to do this on a nearly windless one. I suppose at this point, I was so utterly frustrated that I was not thinking quite clearly. So there I sat on my front steps waiting for the slightest breeze to stir and then tossing up pans of grain and hoping like crazy it would winnow. I'm surprised the neighbors didn't have me hospitalized.

In the end, I had about a cup-and-a-half of wild rice, a smoky, smelly home, red, sore, and smarting hands, a bag of unhulled wild rice which got composted, a bruised ego, and neighbors who looked sideways at me in a kinda funny way.

At right is a recipe a friend and I created with my then-so-precious bounty. Enjoy!