A Vegan Called Bacon

I’m pleased that spring has started to gush green things at me, because it gives me a chance to do more foraging. In the field, I’m using Richard Mabey’s classic book Food for Free, which I now own in handy pocket format.

My foraging season started a couple of weeks ago with a hunt for Saint George’s Mushrooms, but it was too early, and the weather had been too dry. All I got was a handful of hawthorn leaves, which, according to Mr Mabey, are commonly called “bread and cheese”, and are “the first wild vegetable a country child eats”. Apparently Food for Free was written in the twentieth century, but I suspect this was in an alternate dimension. For the record, “bread and cheese” tastes like grass-flavoured parsley.

We’ve also had some very nice nettle soup, which led me to wonder how people collected it before gloves were invented.

The prettiest and tastiest stuff so far are ramsons (wild garlic), which were in full flower last week down by the river. It makes for a wonderful, radioactive green soup, and the flowers are a pretty addition.  However, making fritters with the flowers, as suggested on one website, seemed like a fairly pointless idea to me.

Kim is not quite as eager as me to eat wild food, mainly due to potential unwanted urine-related garnish. When picking blackberries as a child, my mum always used to advise us to “stay away from cocky height”, but unfortunately this sage wisdom is hard to follow with low, ground-covering perennials like ramsons.

Canine excreta hopefully washed away, I also made a kind of ramson pesto, which (if I don’t eat it all) should keep for a few months. I have been spreading it liberally on pizzas and toast. A mission to augment it with edible flowers led to my favourite wild garlic dish of the season:

It’s a basic risotto, with a generous amount of ramson paste stirred in. I garnished it with dandelion “hearts”, some foraged chives, and a daisy - which is described in the literature as bitter, but I found to be quite delicate and fragrant.

Dandelion hearts are the unopened young flower buds, which have a slightly bitter but complex flavour. They also sport an unattractive small-black-blob appearance that raised Kim’s suspicion levels rather high.  I’ll be eating them again, but I don’t think she will.