Springtime Foraging In The UK
Why Don't We Have a Strong Foraging Tradition in Britain?
There’s a deep-seated mystery hiding in the landscapes of this country that I’d love to have explained one day. It’s this: why don’t we have an ancient rural tradition that sees ordinary citizens gleaning food for free in the countryside? We nibble at the edges, yes, but we don’t really go anywhere near the idea that, if necessary, rural-dwellers could sustain life and soul by foraging among the woodlands and hedgerows and on the beaches.
Selection of spring greens foraged on Exmoor
Traditional Wild Foods in the British Countryside
I’ve lived in the British countryside for most of my life and, off the top of my head, I can think of just a mean handful of delights people traditionally go out to pick. Blackberries, field mushrooms, sloes, the odd hazelnut or chestnut… There are others and obviously certain individuals have been, and are, far more adventurous - but by-and-large the UK public does not regard the un-farmed countryside as a supplementary bread-basket.
Foraging in Southern Italy: A Lesson from Puglia
In comparison, I was enjoying a springtime visit to Puglia a few years ago where I was bewildered to see a great many bent figures out on the rocky hillsides. What were they doing? Picking basketfuls of what are sometimes called piante selvatiche (wild plants) or ‘horta’, the Greek word for ‘wild greens’. Stuff like dandelion leaves, thistles, forms of chard, sorrel, chicory, wild asparagus and fennel. In spring you will see ‘horta’ heavily featured in most rural restaurants in Southern Italy.
Why Didn't British Rural Communities Forage Like Other Nations?
Historically speaking, they’re poor people down in that part of Italy, and here’s the thing - years ago for this newspaper I wrote several features about the tiny harbours of North Cornwall and Devon which were once busy with Westcountry folk emigrating to the Americas because, mysteriously, they were starving to death in our verdant land. Why weren’t those poor, land-less, Westcountry peasants picking and eating our version of ‘horta’ or, indeed, harvesting the vast numbers of edible fungi we have in our damp land, or going down on the shoreline to grab the many types of edible seaweed?
There are obviously historic reasons why so many other nations around the globe did pass down a comprehensive knowledge of wild food from generation to generation, but why didn’t we? I’d love to know. Something to do with the Industrial Revolution, that’s part of the reason - but it must be more than that because countries like Italy, France and Japan all became industrialised.
Meeting Foraging Expert David Beazley in Devon
I was talking to a top foraging expert last week who was as baffled as me - but at least David Beazley has plenty of answers when it comes to harvesting the good stuff.
Forager David Beazley
David, who now describes himself as “retired chef-current forager”, was kind enough to travel all the way from South Devon to my Exmoor valley so that he could demonstrate the art of picking the kinds of wild spring greens we have here in the South West. And it was a revelation!
A Foraging Expedition in the Exmoor Valley
As you can see in one of my photographs, we made a colourful and delicious salad - and also, under David’s instruction, I made a surprisingly good version of a homity-pie… From hogweed, of all things!
We’ve met David before in these pages. He used to be a chef-lecturer at Exeter College and he’d occasionally take his students out on foraging trips. “So many chefs do not know where their food comes from,” he told me as we set off up my valley the other day. “They pick up a phone and the ingredients are with them next morning. Apart from anything else, going out to where the food comes from can help give you ideas.”
Cooking Wild Greens: Hogweed Homity Pie and Foraged Salads
And so I have written several foraging articles in the past with David’s help (wild estuary eating at Shaldon, prawning at Dawlish, and one about St George’s mushroom - highly relevant to the present week as you’ll see in our panel), which meant I was over the moon when he sent a message saying: “Why don’t I come up to your place and we’ll see what we can pick in your local hedgerows…”
David told me that he was celebrating his 50th year in the catering industry, having worked with well known chefs like Sonia Stevenson (the first British woman to be awarded a Michelin star) at Devon’s Horn of Plenty, and Joyce Molyneux at Dartmouth’s Carved Angel. They taught him to look to the local environment for inspiration and ingredients.
“At the Carved Angel we had a German couple who used to bring in wild mushrooms. The money for their basket of mushrooms was more than I was earning in a week! So I gave myself a plan and ended up going to Haldon Hill Forest (near Exeter) thinking I’d get some chanterelles or ceps. Unfortunately, it took me over two years to find them. But that’s how I got involved. Now foraging is very current and trendy with chefs.”
Round penny-wort, for the salad
From Forest to Plate: The Modern Popularity of Foraging
At this point David talked about a hugely successful new restaurant called Gather, in Totnes, which is run by one of his former students. Harrison Brockington was recently named South West Chef of the Year and the restaurant has been featured in the Channel 4 series Remarkable Places to Eat - and David calls in on a weekly basis to deliver foraged goodies gleaned from his South Dartmoor locale.
Hesp Out West hopes to visit Gather in the near future, in the meantime our foraging mentor was busy picking edible plants within two minutes of leaving my front door. He could have begun harvesting sooner than that but I asked him to ignore the bales of wild garlic on offer, as it’s the one wild green I do pick and I’ve been consuming vast quantities of it for the past two months. Instead, David was grabbing fronds of hogweed, which I have always avoided thanks to the reputation of its over-sized giant cousin, which’ll give you a nasty rash.
Fresh chopped hogweed
Tasting Wild Flavours: How Wild Greens Surprise the Palate
Like a lot of wild greens, hogweed is not an item you’d want to eat raw, but cooked it has a unique flavour that is difficult to describe. A touch of extremely mild celery with a peppery undertone, would be one way of putting it. The chopped and sautéed young stalks and leaves went extremely well in the homity-pies, after we’d mixed them with mashed potatoes, which we then piled into a pre-cooked pastry case before topping with grated smoked cheddar. Heated in the oven for ten minutes, the little pies were a springtime treat of pure and simple joy.
wild springtime salad with hogweed homity pie
We served them with a platter of foraged leaves which, tossed in a simple dressing of olive oil and sea-salt, formed the most interesting and, in many ways, delicious salad I’ve had this year. “I’m guessing there’s at least 10 if not 12 different things in the salad,” commented David. “All with their different flavours - the wild garlic flowers are quite strong, the sorrel is very citrusy, the penny warts are quite melon-like and cucumbery… Then you've got the different flowers (white wild garlic, yellow primrose and dandelion petals, pink campion) although they don’t have much flavour, they do bring some colour to it.
“You’re getting a whole new range of flavours to play with,” he went on. “And, actually, because this is wild food, the flavours tend to be stronger than if it was cultivated. For example, take a cultivated strawberry, then compare it with a little wild strawberry from the hedgerow - there's more flavour in that tiny strawberry than there is in that big one, if it has any flavour in it at all!
Hogweed homity pie
“Food is about the flavours, so foraging offers a whole new palette to play with,” said David as he left to drive back to Devon, and I couldn’t agree with him more.
St George’s Mushroom: A Hidden Springtime Treasure
Mushroom Foraging in Spring: The Surprise of St George’s
fresh picked St George’s mushroom
A few years ago David Beazley invited me to go hunting for mushrooms in April, which I thought odd at the time. Late summer and autumn are usually regarded as the time for fungi foraging. But when he added that we’d meet in a Westcountry industrial estate, I thought perhaps it was an April Fools joke.
In the event, we ended up finding a haul of truly delicious fungi, called St George’s Mushroom after the fact that it usually appears on or around St George’s Day. For some reason, a greensward in the busy industrial estate (a location I shall keep secret in honour of David) was thick with these small white fungi.
How to Identify and Cook St George’s Mushrooms
“They always grow in grass,” David told me as we stalked between the industrial units five years ago. “Grass and trees - not sure which variety - but we have cherry and birch here, which they are associated with. The mushrooms are creamy in colour - the cap, stalk, and gills are all the same colour. The cap itself is wavy and it tucks underneath around the edge, they have a mealy smell, and they are solid and heavy for their size.”
David goes to great lengths to hunt down St George’s because he says they’re one of the best edible fungi we have.
“I love them because of their texture and amazing flavour,” he told me. “They are among my favourites. But if you’d spotted these in the autumn when the amanitas are out, you’d be right to be extra cautious because they have the same sort of creamy white top, stalk and gills - and you could kill somebody with one of those. People say that because they grow in April-May they are definitely safe, but I would still go through careful identification just to be sure.
St George’s mushrooms topped by poached egg
“I use my skill as a forager to find them and I use my skill as a chef to maximise their flavour. I love to pan-fry them - the same pan as the one in which I’ve fried smoked bacon. Then put some cream in to pick up all that lovely flavour. Place on a muffin with a poached egg on top. Absolutely delicious. A springtime breakfast! You could leave the bacon out if you were a vegetarian, but you would miss out because you need a bit of saltiness.
“I also like the idea of wild garlic mushrooms. So I’ve fried the St Georges in butter, then put some shredded wild garlic through it. To make it a bit cheffy, I’ve put it in a wrap. You can eat it hot or cold - either way. Take it with you on a spring walk.”
A Final Forager’s Reflection
The St Georges I enjoyed with David five years ago were amazingly good - alas we didn’t find a single one while foraging in my valley this week. But, hey-ho, there was plenty of other bounty to celebrate.
St George mushrooms in a wrap
