Wild food from the park – catch-up time #1: July

July? JULY? I realise I haven’t blogged for nearly two months. But time, as ever, rolls on. We have been continuing with our attempts to find different things to eat from the seasonal wild food popping up each month in our local park, the King's Park in Stirling and then writing about it for you - and there’s lots to be written about and, hopefully, read about and so - on on!

July brought some new items to the King’s Park wild food menu, plus more of some we’ve already had. The raspberry canes continued to produce a great crop of juicy sweet berries and we continued to pick them and eat them off the bush or with yoghurt, or freeze them. By the end of July, we did manage to gather and freeze a total of 6kg of berries, which will last us the rest of the year in various uses.

Fine wild raspberries in their prime at the peak of the season

In early July, I spent the weekend (Wimbledon Finals weekend, I think) involved in making this TV show (yes, I'm somewhere in the choir!) and returned home on a warm and beautiful summer evening to find that O had constructed this delight:

They look great, don't they?

It is a chardonnay jelly with wild raspberries (based on a recipe from Nigella Lawson) and was pretty special eaten cold from the fridge, in the garden on a (rare) warm July evening!

We also used the raspberries in a jug of Pimms (posh, what?) with some mint leaves from the garden, shown here with some garlic bread made using the wild garlic pesto we made in April:

Another highly seasonal appearance for a few weeks in July, and a very welcome and exciting one for a wild food project, is the emergence of the flowers of the lime tree.

Lime tree flowers

I wrote about lime trees previously here. Lime blossom is surely one of the most fragrant of any of our native plants and ranks up at the top of my favourite native flower scents, along with honeysuckle. It is also, after air-drying for a few days, the ingredient for the traditional linden blomen tea.  

Air drying lime flowers on the window ledge. A few in a teapot or a couple in a mug with boiling water makes a great drink.

In his mighty 'Flora Britannica', Richard Mabey says of lime trees: “All groups of lime trees, of whatever species, are wonderfully fragrant when in full blossom in July. They are also the noisiest of trees at this time, and the roar of bees in them can often be heard 50 yards away. The blossom makes a rich tea, tilleul, which was recommended as a mild sedative during the last war.” 

Roger Phillips, in his 'Wild Food' book, proffers the following information: “The flowers are used to make linden tea which is famous for its delicious taste and soothing effect on the digestive and nervous system. Honey from lime flowers is regarded as the best flavoured and most valuable in the world and is used extensively in medicine and liqueurs.”

On the warm July morning when I gathered the lime blossom above, the avenue of lime trees in the Park was bathed in a wonderful honey-like scent from the lime blossom and bees were busy, noisily gathering nectar and pollen in the trees. A few of the dried lime flowers above, in a mug with boiling water, makes a scented slightly sweet infusion. Kept in an airtight jar, we’ve found that dried lime flowers will retain this potential for many months, well over a year in fact.

We also made a couple of major batches of elderflower cordial in July although, rather foresightedly, I published a photo of the summer’s whole production in the post on June’s wild food experiences, here – which was written in July. Here’s a photo of the July cordial anyway, just for completeness!

But that wasn’t the end of the cordial developments in July. Despite the general lack of wetlands in the King’s Park (partly down to the major drainage work for the golf course over a large proportion of the park), there are a few wee wet corners and, in one of them in July, we found lots of the large native wetland plant meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria). I wrote previously about meadowsweet in one of my posts of the Ladybird seasons books, here, and mentioned it as the original source of aspirin and that’s an issue for its use to produce cordial.

The recipe we used, from the wild food book 'Seafood andeat it' by Xa Milne and Fiona Houston, points out that people who are allergic to aspirin should avoid it. A better reason for avoiding it would be that it is pretty harsh. The recipe had too much lemon for my tastes and I found the aspirin flavour to be a bit off-putting. Still, I've made a couple of litres and I ought to drink it:

Meadowsweet cordial

 and it is more palatable with some apple juice added so all is not yet lost!

That’s all from the Park for that month but a July wild food addendum was our first chanterelles of the year. We visited our good friend Kathy in deepest Aberdeenshire and her local wood had a few good quality chanterelles which we enjoyed for breakfast:

Food from the Park: June

Flaming June? Not for most of the month, it wasn't, in Stirling at least. But we still managed to eat from the Park again in June. And, in wild food terms, it might seem a logical conclusion that the availability of edible species would continue to increase in June as it does in the run of months from March to May. But our experience is that while some new options for a wild food diet do indeed appear, other options become less palatable. Nettles, ground elder, common hogweed and cleavers in the Park, which provided the bulk of vegetable mass for meals in the previous months, have all grown up and become tough, coarse and/or incredibly fibrous. Hawthorn leaves, so soft and nutty-tasting when they first appeared, and lovely in salads in that state, have also toughened up and dropped off our menu. By June, the leaves of wild garlic were also beginning to die back.

But, fortunately for the wild food gastronaut, there are new kids on the block in June. From mid-June in Stirling, the creamy-white, fragrant umbrellas of flowers, or umbals, of the elder can be found in profusion on elder bushes all around the edge of the Park (see below). As I've written previously, the elder is an important source of ingredients for wild food - in winter, we picked the jelly ear or Jew's ear fungus from dead elder trees. In autumn, I have no doubt that we'll find ways to incorporate elder berries into a meal. And in summer, well, best of all is elder blossom. Every summer, we make a big batch of elderflower cordial. We drink it usually with sparkling water but sometimes just with tap water, and often with ice cubes, frozen raspberries and the blue flowers of borage from the garden thrown in. It's a bit special.

We started making this year's cordial about in early June and we finished the last bottle of last year's stock three weeks later, so 12 litres must be about right, since we don't stint on its use during the year! We use the recipe in the book "Sensational Preserves" by Hilaire Walden, which includes the addition of citric acid to prevent fermentation. Actually, we made about 14 litres last year but two bottles fermented, probably as we didn't have quite enough citric acid left for the recipe by the end of the season - so 12 litres survived.

Elderflowers - raw material for one of summer's true wild food delights!

 Here's a picture of our final elderflower cordial "product" for 2011, labelled up as a bit of fun.

Our 2011 elderflower cordial collection

The other special wild food that appeared in June was wild raspberries, which are usually abundant in our Park and which few people bother to collect. We usually harvest about 6 kg of these over the several-week long season and these are mostly frozen for use through the year, in porridge and in puddings (and, once, to make a framboise liqueur).

Wild raspberries in King's Park.

 Our raspberry season usually begins with us simply eating the first ripe berries off the bush for a couple of weeks in early-mid June when we are out walking the dog, until there are enough ripe berries to make it worthwhile doing some organised picking. The 6 kg total usually arrives in about half-to-one kg batches, which is what we can pick in about 30 minutes with both of us picking. That's generally because 30 minutes is about the limit of my patience with the nettles and bramble thorns that interweave the Park's raspberry patches. Unless we are planning to cook them down for something, in which case, they can be frozen in a lump, we normally freeze them laid out in a single layer on baking trays in the freezer and then bag up the already-frozen berries.

The 2011 raspberry season began worryingly slowly and it looked like last winter's extremely extended and severe cold spell had killed off the majority of the raspberry canes (wild raspberries produce the current year's fruit on the previous year's new growth). That had indeed happened and there were large areas normally dense with raspberry canes which were almost devoid this year, but the remaining survivors seemed to have benefitted hugely from the very warm dry spell of weather in April, resulting in a great pollination and a huge crop on the remaining bushes. We picked steadily through late June and all of July such that, with the final picking session in our raspberry season, we managed to bring our total to just over 6 kg again this year (by the very end of July, when I wrote this catch-up note).

Incidentally, we also managed to include some Salicornia or glasswort in our diet in June, a salt marsh pioneer plant that has been eaten in Britain for thousands of years. Highly nutritious but if eaten too regularly, it might wear away your teeth due to its high silicon content (it is called glasswort after all!). I seem to recall reading that people from some prehistoric coastal populations in Britain were found, by archaeologists examining their remains from graves, to have wear patterns on their teeth consistent with a high consumption of glasswort.  We didn't pick this ourselves - O bought it from the Loch Fyne Oyster Bar shop. It must have been harvested wild (no one grows it commercially here - or anywhere?), and probably locally to Loch Fyne.

[Addendum, 4th August: Excitingly (admittedly I don't get out much), I was on a bus in Portobello yesterday and saw Salicornia for sale in the window of a traditional fishmonger's - the one with the window constantly washed by a curtain of running water; if you are local, you may know it. Maybe it is becoming more popular. I'd love to know where they source it from].

 We ate it (the green stuff above) as an accompaniment to a breakfast of smoked salmon scrambled eggs, made with Loch Fyne smoked salmon and eggs from our Stirling friend Judy's chickens. Slightly salty and you have to pull the edible vegetable portion off with your teeth and leave the central slightly woody stalk. A slightly odd breakfast item but pretty tasty nevertheless.