The Wild Foods of Great Britain - Where to Find them and how to Cook them

I

Introductory

It may come as a surprise to some of my readers to learn that so many as two hundred and sixty different kinds of Wild Food are to be found and gathered freely in Great Britain without let or hindrance, and without offending against any law in that case made and provided, unless it be the somewhat easily eluded law of trespass. In order to reduce into possession everything enumerated in these pages a ten-shilling gun licence must be taken out; but without this the number is only slightly modified. Leave to go upon land in quest of food should not be difficult to obtain in these days of war, provided no damage be done to crops or fences; and in any case a majority of the edible products provided by Nature are obtainable along the highways and byeways, on common and waste lands, and by the sea-shore. Probably persons dwelling a few miles inland from the South Coast of England are best situated in regard to potential food supplies, for obvious reasons. The seeker after Wild Food is in any case recommended strongly to look for things close to his own place of residence, if that be in the country, in preference to roaming far afield. Probably within sight of his own door there are from twenty to fifty edible products growing unheeded by the average cottager or dweller in a country house; and it will be time when he has discovered these and put them to useful purpose to go in quest of others over the hills and far away.

It is not pretended that everything contained in this manual will be to the taste of everybody. Neither is everything on the menu of Romano’s or the Ritz Hotel always to the taste of all the patrons of these metropolitan refreshment houses. But what is one man’s poison, so far as Wild Food is concerned, may easily become many men’s meat. In discussing the plan of this book with people of different sexes and different degrees of education, I found that one objected to one thing and one to another, not because they had tried them, but because they didn’t like the idea of eating them. If I had omitted everything objected to by one or other of the persons to whom I showed the contents-list, there would in fact have been no contents-list, and the pages of the book would have been blank throughout. My readers, therefore, must understand that the two hundred and sixty products enlisted here are for their choice: they may take or leave them as they please, just as they take or leave the articles exposed to tempt them in shops and stores. The world of Wild Food is all before them where to choose, but they need not lay waste their powers over the question of rejecting such as they do not fancy, good as these in reality are if properly treated and prepared for human food.

Somewhere or other in Great Britain almost everything described in these pages is gathered and used as food by some section of the population. Thus the ordinary garden snail (Helix aspersa) is collected all over the South Cotswold country and sent into Bristol by the ton to be sold to the working classes of that city, who esteem it not only a delicacy, but a necessary article of food. In towns like Wotton-under-Edge the market-price of snails for the day is displayed on a blackboard outside the dealers’ shops, and their collection forms a regular occupation for the women and children of the district.

Again, the edible frog (Rana esculenta) is obtained and used as food in certain districts of East Anglia, and I once partook of a very excellent dish of frogs’ legs at a wayside cottage in the Thetford district on my way home from otter-hunting; though they were not, perhaps, so appetisingly cooked as those I have had in France and Italy.

The gypsies who formerly roamed at large through England and the Border Country beyond the Tweed knew the value of the hedgehog as an article of diet, and I learned the methods of cooking them in various Romany encampments. Although the real gypsies have long since vanished away from Great Britain, they have bequeathed the legacy of the hedgehog to the half-caste race of pikes and travellers which has usurped their name, occupations, and camping-grounds: while, as Richard Jefferies mentioned in Wild Life in a Southern County, the Wiltshire labourers occasionally cooked and ate the same animal.

Seaweeds, under the name of Dulse and Laver, are still commonly cooked by the dwellers on the coasts. Laver bread is offered for sale by the Welsh women to summer visitors at places like Langland Bay; and even in the farmhouses of North Devon it is commonly eaten as a vegetable or a salad. Carragheen Moss and Dulse are eaten in the Highlands of Scotland that abut upon the coast, as well as throughout Ireland.

In parts of Gloucestershire the edible fungus called Blewits (Tricholoma personatum) is not only eaten by the peasants but collected and sold in the Cotswold towns, where it is preferred to the common mushroom. The red whortleberry is similarly gathered and sold as hurts or whorts by the inhabitants of towns like Godalming in Surrey, and Rugeley in Staffordshire, which are situated in the neighbourhood of heathy expanses like Hindhead and Cannock Chase, where these berries are found in great profusion.

Common sense must, however, be brought to bear upon the collection of all Wild Foods, in order to gather them only when they are fit for human consumption, and to provide against their extermination and the consequent cessation of supplies in future years. A great deal of hot air has been lately breathed across the floor of the House of Commons on this subject, and much ill-in-formed rubbish printed in The Times and other newspapers as to the possibility of utilising birds’ eggs and other things for feeding the multitude. Fortunately Nature, as the real Protector of the Poor, steps in to set a bar to the exploitation of Wild Food by the greedy profiteering shop-keepers of towns and cities, who would, an’ they could, send out hordes of ruffians from the slums to ravage the countryside and bring home stores of stuff to be sold at an exorbitant profit in greengrocers’ and poulterers’ shops.

But Nature has ordained that the flesh of beast, bird, or fish is not fit for human food during the season when these animals are engaged in breeding and bringing up their young; and there is a further safeguard in the fact that, with very few exceptions, wild vegetable food must be eaten freshly gathered to be of any use. Very few Wild products will keep for twelve hours after plucking; almost none for twenty-four. Among the exceptions are watercress, common mushrooms, and blackberries, which for this reason have long been articles of commerce. But even these, after transport and with the lapse of time, speedily lose their savour and nutritious properties, and to the true mycophagist (or fungus-eater) the greengrocers’ mushrooms are not worth a penny a pound, much less the half-crown he now has the impudence to ask for them. Even for pickling and preserving purposes the wild fruit or vegetables used cannot be too fresh; and to carry, for example, ashen-keys twenty miles in order to pickle them is merely to waste them and the vinegar thus employed, as the pickle compounded will never