Where the wild foods are

LITTLE ROCK — I wish I had known Billy Joe Tatum. Before her death last March at age 80, Tatum was considered the state’s leading authority on cooking with wild foods and herbs of the Ozarks region. My wife and I have been reading up on Tatum due to our serving as guest editors of Arkansauce, an annual “journal of Arkansas foodways.” For the featured Arkansas cookbook section, we selected Tatum’s Wild Foods Field Guide and Cookbook published in 1976—bearing the assertive subtitle: “An Illustrated guide to 70 Wild Plants and Over 350 Irresistible Ways to Eat Them.” That unreserved title hints at the strong personality and intellect of Billy Joe Tatum.

Billy Joe was born in Little Rock on Feb. 15, 1932, to a Southern Baptist minister named W.O. Taylor who had grown up in Union County. Rev. Taylor and his wife, Minnie Belle, had a houseful of precocious children. Billy Joe’s brother, Professor Orville W. Taylor, was an academic historian best known for his pioneering history of slavery in Arkansas. Billy Joe attended several schools, graduating from Ozark High School. She then studied music at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia with the hope of being an opera singer.

While at OBU, Billy Joe met Harold Tatum, and they were married in 1951. They had four daughters and one son. In 1958, Harold Tatum opened his medical practice in Melbourne, the only physician in Izard County at that time. Billy Joe became her husband’s receptionist and assistant. While accompanying her husband on house calls, Billy Joe developed an interest in the wild foods and herbs found growing along the Ozark byways.

Billy Joe, who had the mind of a naturalist, began to visit with her husband’s patients on how to cook with local wild foods. In 1976, only months after the late-1975 death of wild-food guru Euell Gibbons, Billy Joe brought out her first book, The Wild Foods Field Guide. The book sold well, launching Billy Joe on a career that People magazine described in 1979 as “a kind of cross between Julia Child and the late Euell Gibbons.”

Billy Joe was not only a bright, articulate naturalist and chef, she was also a character—outspoken, funny, and she knew how to give an interview. She wore eccentric hats, went about barefooted, and generally made herself irresistible to the national media, including Johnny Carson and Charles Kuralt.

Billy Joe’s elaborate meals at Wildflower, the beautifully situated Tatum home near Melbourne, were always good fundraisers for the Arkansas Arts Center’s Tabriz auctions. At one dinner, with newly elected governor Bill Clinton in attendance, Billy Joe served everything from watercress soup to hickory nut-stuffed eggs, from venison Wellington to Arkansas black walnut tarts.

Future Lieutenant Governor Winthrop Paul Rockefeller was in attendance at that same dinner, and he had a never-failing appreciation for Tatum’s upfront personality—including being ordered by Billy Joe to take a can of wasp spray and deal with some pesky critters.

Billy Joe did not restrict herself to the kitchen. Indeed, she could often be found in her office working on a new book or article. For several years she wrote a natural history column and later an “Ozarks Cookery” column for the Ozark Mountaineer magazine.

In a 1986 column, Billy Joe mused about how she came to be in the Ozarks in the first place: “I’m not one of those who chose to live in the Ozarks. I chose to live with someone who chose to live here.” After an interesting column touching on Ozark frogs and spiders, she concluded: “I didn’t choose to live in the Ozarks, but I’m here and there sure is a lot to see, to hear, and to learn so I expect I’ll keep on doing just that.”

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Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living at Farmington, Ark. Email him at tomd@pgtc.com.