Try this, says Raoul, picking up a succulent green plant from the woodland
floor. We all take a leaf and eat it, making the obligatory Masterchef
“mmms” and “aahs” that are used to show one is eating with intelligence.
Raoul looks pleased with himself. “Ees poisonous,” he says. A psychosomatic
spasm passes around the group. “But only if you eat a lot.” It is some
consolation.
The occasion for such perilous grubbing is a foraging expedition in the Welsh
hills, headed by Raoul van den Broucke. He is the Flemish forager-in-chief
for the local gastropub, The Foxhunter, which specialises in locally sourced
food and runs foraging courses to enable its customers to do the same.
Not so long ago, in the Gold Card Age, the idea of foraging for food seemed at
best a charming fancy, at worst a self-indulgent folly; a Petit Hameau of
food fads. Why ferret in the bushes for porcini mushrooms when you can buy
them for £25 a kilo at Borough Market in Central London?
No longer. The pincer movement of rising food and falling house prices has
squeezed the pleasure-seeking middle classes. We have had to turn our backs
on luxury; to stop Tasting the Difference; to think twice, thrice even,
before putting a packet of organic coriander into our shopping basket. We
have even had to start shopping at Aldi, for heaven's sake. Clearly
something must be done.
Foraging could be that something. Hunting food in hedgerows used to be
confined to the sort of person who knits their own yoghurt, but the recent
rehabilitation of British cooking not only sanctions but applauds such
behaviour, with the chef Thomasina Miers and the forager Guy Grieve serving
up spiced squirrel on Channel 4, Valentine Warner having a pop at wood
pigeons and Rick Stein seasoning his fish with self-gathered wild garlic.
While such ingredients may be exclusive and recherché in gastronomic terms,
they are physically abundant in the fields and hedgerows of Britain. Use
these plants and you will be able to prepare meals that are not only frugal
but fashionable. All you need to know is where to look for them.
Which is where courses such as this can help. The day is divided into two
parts: a morning session in which you hunt and gather in hill and hedgerow
and an afternoon session in which you return to the pub and feast on the
fruits of your labours.
This morning, ten would-be foragers meet in front of the pub, a converted
station house, at 9am. Raoul himself appears a few minutes later, wearing a
wide-brimmed white hat and carrying a big wicker basket and a stick. He
waves the basket in the air. “Here's some I picked earlier,” he says,
pointing to some blue-grey Blewit mushrooms inside.
“In order to forage, we must first climb up this hill,” Raoul says, in a
wise-old-man-of-the-woods tone. He points at the mountain behind the pub
with his stick. “You know why?” The class meekly suggest answers. For the
temperature? For the humidity? For the air quality? “For the pub. There's an
excellent one up there.” He looks pleased.
As we walk Raoul keeps up a culinary commentary on the plants we pass. Under
his expert eye a bland-looking verge becomes a salad bowl of possibilities.
A single bank yields sorrel, the spicy herb “jack by the hedge” (“Excellent
with lamb”) and crisp pennywort; all edible, all delicious. Rocket suddenly
begins to seem as bland as iceberg lettuce.
The tastiest leaf we try is wood sorrel - the “poisonous” plant Raoul gave us
initially. “It does contain poison, so you wouldn't want to eat a plate full
of it. But it is fine in small quantities and an excellent garnish,” he
tells us. Its taste is highly prized by local restaurants, which pay Raoul
£90 a kilo for it.
The potential for poisoning adds a certain nervous edge to the morning's
foraging. After all, it's not long since Nicholas Evans, the author of The
Horse Whisperer, along with his wife and brother-in-law, had to have kidney
dialysis after eating the mushroom Cortinarius speciosissimus. This looks
like the edible chanterelle but, according to the Association of British
Fungus Groups, causes your liver to “be broken down into a pulp”.
As we hunt Raoul explains some general rules for knowing which fungi are
poisonous and which are safe. “Mushrooms with white gills tend to be
poisonous,” he says. Someone points out that in the basket we have collected
some mushrooms with white gills. “Apart from those ones,” he says.
Smell is apparently also a good guide. “If you want to know whether a mushroom
is edible, smell it and have a guess.” He picks a particularly poisonous
specimen called Clitocybe dealbata. “Try,” he says waving it under our
noses. We sniff. “What does it smell like?” “It smells like a mushroom,”
says one pupil. The others nod. Raoul looks depressed. He changes tack. “I
think the best rule is, if you're not sure, don't bother.”
My fellow foragers would tend to agree. “I'm not convinced I'd do this on my
own,” says Anna, a writer from London. Rob, her boyfriend, agrees. “I think
this course might make me a more adventurous forager in the supermarkets,”
he says. “I'll now feel emboldened to choose some of the more exotic
mushrooms in Waitrose.”
However Raoul is convinced that foraging is not dangerous if done properly.
“Use a book to acquaint yourself with a couple of species, and then only go
for these,” he says. “There are plenty of edible mushrooms that are easy to
identify.”
A few hours and many more mushrooms later, we return to The Foxhunter to
deliver our basket of foraged food to Matt Tebbutt, the chef and owner.
Matt combines our finds with the other food that has come in that morning.
Throughout the day local foragers drop into The Foxhunter, bringing what
they have found, trapped or shot. The pub bases its menus around whatever
appears. “If someone turns up with a big salmon they've just caught, we'll
scrap whatever other menu plans we had and go with that,” he explains.
The stress of such ad hoc cooking, he says, is more than outweighed by its
interest. “Foraged food is fresh and unusual; it keeps things exciting.”
Some of the foods that appear are so unusual that modern cookery books don't
deal with them. “I have to turn to the likes of Mrs Beeton or Eliza Acton to
find out what to do with some of the stuff,” Matt says. “Then I have to turn
somewhere else again to find out what the hell those ladies mean by a
quart.”
In the stone-flagged kitchen, the mushrooms are mixed with butter and sprigs
of rosemary, then fried for a few moments - wild mushrooms are so delicate,
they need little more. Our foraging menu consists of sweet chestnut soup and
locally shot pheasant served with the locally gathered samphire and
mushrooms.
The finished dish, with its crispy emerald samphire and jewel-bright
mushrooms, is carried out with some cere-
mony to the waiting foragers. With such archaic ingredients, the menu is the
height of culinary fashion and would be extremely expensive to prepare if
one made it using shop-bought ingredients.
But almost all of it has been garnered free from the hedgerows. We tuck in
with smugly self-sufficient greed. Yet we all pause nervously before the
first mushroom. We check its gills. Not white. One brave soul bites in and
chews. He doesn't die. “It's not poisonous.”
Foraging trip and wild food lunch at The
Foxhunter, £125 for two people; £35 for each additional person (01873
881101).
Fascinating article and much to my taste. Only one odd thing, the foraging menu contained "locally" gathered samphire (4th last paragraph). Where is samphire "locally" gathered near Y Fenni?
James Cleland, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire