Spring Forager Course Review, by Chris Middleton - 11/11/06
"Seasonal food at its best - Cuisine sauvage"
Christopher Middleton learns to forage for his supper on a two-day wilderness cookery course. A dark, damp wood in the wilds of the Lake District, and the scent of the Devil is in the air. Actually, it's wild garlic, but 300 years ago the aroma was associated not with piquant Gallic cuisine, but with the breath of Beelzebub - at least that's what mothers told their errant offspring.
Wild at heart: instructors show students how to source their supper from the land.
"It was a way of making sure the children came home after a day in the fields," says wilderness food expert Ben McNutt. " The scent is at its strongest in the evening, when the Devil was said to be out on the prowl. The plant was even called Jack-by-the-Hedge. Jack was a common name for Satan."
But we're calling it garlic mustard, and later today we're going to be adding it to the large heap of unusual leaves and herbs we've collected on our walk. We'll be eating the salad with fresh-caught fish, which we're going to cook on our home-made fire.
We've come to the hills around Lake Windermere to take part in a wilderness cookery course run by McNutt's firm, Woodsmoke. Not only does he point out all the tasty greenery that otherwise we'd walk straight past, he also shows us how to collect the right mix of firewood (twigs, sticks and stakes), build the right type of fire (V-shaped) and generally make the most of Nature's well-stocked larder - without poisoning ourselves.
"Sorrel and cuckoo pint," says McNutt, holding up two almost identical pointed leaves. "Very similar plants, but while one's lovely in salads and brilliant served with trout, the other is extremely toxic. Can anyone tell which is which?"
Only the closest inspection reveals that the cuckoo pint (also known as wild arum, or Lords and Ladies) has a distinctive vein that runs right round the circumference of the leaf. It's something that none of us would have known beforehand. Just how unclued-up we are is made clear in the course of our morning forage, as we discover that raw thistle tips (stripped down) taste like a mixture of green beans and celery, blackberry shoots make lovely tea, and hairy bittercress is an acceptable alternative to rocket.
Once we've filled our baskets with green stuff, it's time to head back to our camp (the course involves sleeping under canvas for two nights), and start to turn forage into food. Waiting for us are plaice and sardines pulled out of the sea that morning at nearby Maryport.
There are, explains McNutt, numerous ways to cook a fish in the wild (bake it in a firepit, steam it in fresh herbs), but we are going to be fixing them to long oak platters and propping them up by the fire till they're done. To begin, we must singe the surface of the oak (to sterilise it), then whittle down twigs to make plaice-fixing pegs. Next the sardines are skewered with sharp sticks at either end, thereby forming ladder-like fish kebabs. As for summoning up the gift of fire, we can do it the hard way (like aborigines, with a wooden spindle), or the easy way, which involves running a knife down the side of a metal "firestick" until it ignites the heaps of bark chippings that we have detached from the surrounding birch trees. Intrepid as ever, we go for the easy way.
Soon the camp is a mass of little fires, each with a catch of the day neatly pegged and grilling beside it. "Wait till the skin turns leathery, then dig in," our instructors advise. "After that, we'll be moving on to a second course of mussels cooked with white wine and some of the wild garlic we've picked today." Tomorrow night, we have tuition in bread-baking, oven-building and sea bass-steaming to look forward to. All served with a glass of Soave."We used not to allow alcohol, but you can't have a food course without wine, can you?" says Woodsmoke co-ordinator Lisa Fenton, who, like McNutt, served a four-year apprenticeship with television bushcraft expert Ray Mears.
"Once upon a time, these courses would have been for purists only, but wild food has suddenly got a whole lot more mainstream."
What to pick to eat on the wild side:
- Hogweed - The baby stems are delicious when steamed and served with melted butter.
- Hairy bittercress - A tangy, peppery salad leaf that's a great alternative to rocket.
- Bistort - Mashed-up leaf best suited to savoury oat puddings.
- Dandelion - The flowers can be frittered and the roots cooked as a carbohydrate, or roast and ground into coffee. (The bitterness of the leaf is reduced if it is hidden from sunlight for two days before picking.)
- Golden saxifrage - Stubbly green leaves that are full of minerals (magnesium, calcium, zinc).
- Pig nuts - A rather delicious crunchy, carrot-cum-beansprout-cum-radish-type snack.
- Sorrel - Sweet, tasty leaves that are lovely either with trout or new potatoes and olive oil.
- Herb Bennet - The thin, trailing roots are alive with clove-like flavour.
- Burdock - The chunky, parsnip-like roots are good in stews.
- Thistle Stems - Stripped of their hairy outer leaves, the tips taste like a mixture of celery and green beans.
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