Food For Free: Foraging For 'Bush Tucker'

As an errant Devonian, now residing in the (comparatively) big city, I get the occasional Thoreau-esque pang for open spaces and fresh air. This is compounded when I’m faced with the indignity of paying up to £3 for a miniscule punnet of blackberries, food I remember as being abundant, easy to pick and guzzle on the spot and, more importantly, free.

The recent glut of foraging how-to’s, including Xa Milne and Fiona Houston’s memoir-cum-guidebook Seaweed and Eat It and the re-issue of Pamela Michael’s seminal Edible Wild Plants And Herbs compendium, offer up a vision of the countryside as a free-for-all version of Fresh ‘n’ Wild.

Naively overexcited at the though of reliving my juice-stained childhood, I persuade my friend Ryan to drive me beyond the suburbs, clutching my rubber gloves with such fevered excitement people must assume I’m on day release.

This is definitely a salad-bar kind of a foraging expedition- chewing the head off a live stickleback, Ray Mears stylee, is too much for my delicate nature. Admittedly, the end of May is not such a hot season for complimentary vegetation- berries aren’t yet hanging heavily from the bushes and we’ve just missed being hit by the heady ‘I-didn’t know there was a Trattoria out HERE’ smell of ramsons, aka wild garlic. What we are advised to keep our eyes peeled for is elder, linden and hawthorn trees, offering up edible leaves and flowers, plus underused herbs such as woodruff and borage and pignuts, buried underground and once the snack of choice for Scotland's pre-tuck shop school children.

So, with one last mournful look at the tea rooms, we leave the throngs behind and head to across the rough moorland towards tiny lochs and distant hills.

Michael recommends picking young buds of gorse and infusing them in hot water to make a tea. Well, they’re certainly the easiest things to spot; fat bushes of luminous yellow standing out like a horde of advancing lollipop ladies. Burying in with gay abandon I hear a rustling and look down to see the tail end of an adder slink away into the undergrowth. I make Ryan continue the picking while I hop around from foot to foot like a big jessie. OK, so concealed areas are now out.

Michael’s book is beautifully illustrated, but my eye clearly needs a bit more training to distinguish bog myrtle from ground elder. The afternoon’s conversation goes largely like this:

Ryan: Oooohhh, is that mint/rosemary/thyme?

Me: (eating leaf) Uuurrrrggghh. No, it is not.

Dandelion leaves are rife and, after nibbling a couple of sour old boots, I began to recognise the younger, sweeter ones which could happily replace farmed rocket in my salad bowl.

I was desperate for sorrel - gorgeous stirred into melted butter and poured over fish or whizzed up with frozen peas to make a quick, cheaper-than-chips soup - but was unlucky this time. Back home, my fistful of gorse buds do indeed make a refreshing brew; a light straw colour liquor with a heady honey aroma and a light, nutty taste.

Locating wild food is no picnic, but every edible find (no matter how much of a canape) feels like a triumph. The seaside calls next, as I could definitely go some rock samphire and sea beet. Ultimately, think of it as a form of vegan-friendly hunting; trawling the hedgerows and embankments forces you to slow your pace, drawing you to nature's minutia for a change, instead of the usual showboating mountains.