Wild food from the park – catch-up #2: August

Summer, such as it was in August, continued to bring us fresh opportunities to eat (and drink) out of the Park. Earlier in the (so-called) summer, we spotted a short section of hedgerow in a discreet corner of the Park that had wild plums growing – the identification is uncertain – they might be cherry plums (particularly as the ripe fruits are bright red!). At that stage, they were small, hard, green fruit, a long way from being ripe. By August, the first of the plums were definitely ready for harvesting:

Don't these look great! Sweet and juicy.

 

It is maybe no surprise that our identification of this fruiting bush is a bit indeterminate - Richard Mabey, in ‘Flora Britannica’, discusses the “lineage of Byzantine complexity” of wild plums in Britain, then describes feral plums as one of the best wild foods, many being edible straight off the tree (unlike sloes). We decided to use our wild plum harvest, with sugar and vodka, to make a wild plum vodka:

First, you add the sugar

Then, you add the vodka. Then you wait...

 

 

 This has already started taking on a red colour from the fruit and will be ready in a few weeks, or at least in time for Christmas.

Ray Mears and Professor Gordon Hillman, in their (BBC) book ‘Wild Food’, write very interestingly on the importance of hazel nuts in the diets of our prehistoric ancestors in Britain. The sophistication of our Mesolithic ancestors’ understanding of how to prepare hazelnuts to improve their palatability and storage potential was impressive. Archaeological sites across Britain have revealed many remains of shallow roasting pits and hazelnut shell middens (waste piles). We have had high hopes for a huge harvest of hazelnuts, which would provide us with lots of recipe options. All summer, we’ve watched as hazelnuts developed in profusion on most of the many hazel bushes and trees in King’s Park.

Then we went on holiday to Pembrokeshire for a week and when we returned, maybe 90% of the nuts had vanished! It turns out that the fiendish grey squirrels are capable of stripping hazelnuts from hazel bushes once they reach a sufficiently palatable stage (which presumably occurred when we were away).

My friend Martin, who is developing a forest garden on the Black Isle using the principles pioneered by the horticulturalist Robert Hart, advises me that where grey squirrels have colonised, as here in Stirling, it may be a waste of time trying to grow hazelnuts as a crop (or, it seems, to look for wild hazels as a reliable source of food) as they'll have the lot. Nevertheless, we persisted and collected a small stock of hazelnuts while they were still green and left them to go brown on a south-facing window sill (I have no idea if it is OK to eat them green).

Hazelnuts, at the stage that we were still hopeful that they might feed us proportionately to the effort it took to collect them

But when we cracked them all in September, 90% were either empty or undeveloped – a poor return for our efforts! How we made use of the meagre harvest, I’ll tell you in a later wild food post.

Wild sorrel (new young leaves only) and wood sorrel continued to be available in the Park and we used them to garnish a wild watercress and bean soup (we picked the watercress in a wee stream at Manorbier in Pembrokeshire just before we came home to Scotland):

Wild watercress ready for cooking

Watercress and bean soup, with wild sorrell and wood sorrell

We also continued to use our harvested raspberries from the freezer on yogurt with honey for pudding or, as here for example, in a (rare) gin and tonic as a fruity garnish:

An additional wild food bonanza landed in our laps on holiday in August in Pembrokeshire, when we found a thicket of densely fruiting damsons growing on the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path and collected a big bag. We used these for damson muffins:

and for damson gin:

One for later in the Winter. Cleaned us out of cheap gin too! Still needs a bit of stirring though, to dissolve all of that sugar...

 

Signs of the times: Summer #2 (Summer picture 2)

More comparisons between the British countryside of today and that from 1959-1961 in the paintings of Charles Tunnicliffe in the Ladybird "What to look for..." series of books.

“The world’s adrowse in twilight hushfulness,
There’s purple lilac in your little room,

And somewhere out beyond the evening gloom

Small boys are culling summer watercress...”

by Anna Gordon Keown, from “Reported Missing” (1916)

 

(Copyright: Ladybird Books)

Summer Picture 2

This is likely to be a bit of a shorter post this time as I have already covered several of the elements in earlier posts. This picture shows a shallow water scene – it could be a pond, or a slow-flowing lowland river; the text doesn’t make it clear (and it doesn’t really matter!). A female mallard and her half-fledged brood are foraging in the water below a willow tree. In the tree, a sedge warbler is hunting for insects. Yellow flag-iris is in flower, emerging from the water, alongside some water-cress, also in flower. We looked previously at the flag-iris briefly here, the mallard and the pussy-willow or sallow in the first Spring post here and, latterly, the sedge-warbler here. The yellow flag-iris in my garden pond is at this stage exactly at the moment, so I'm not very far off the mark in my self-imposed timetable for this series of posts.

I didn’t say much about the willow at the time. The two commonest willow species in Britain are probably goat willow (Salix caprea) and grey willow (Salix cinerea), also both known colloquially as pussy willow or sallow). The willow in the picture is described in the accompanying text as sallow-willow, so could be either. The “pussy-willow” fur-like male-catkin buds shown in the Spring picture are long gone by this time of year. Goat willow tolerates drier conditions that grey willow and so may also grow away from water, e.g. along hedgerows, on waste ground, etc, so I am going to assume that the picture shows grey willow.

The New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora (which has been so useful for this series of posts so far) shows that grey willow has a near-ubiquitous distribution when recorded at the 10-kilometre square scale. It is generally a lowland species but is recorded across most of the Highlands too. The New Atlas suggests that the range of this species may be increasing, especially in England and the south of Ireland, although it is difficult to distinguish this as it is so frequent already!

So, the only feature of the painting that I haven’t discussed already is the watercress emerging from the water at the bottom of the picture. Richard Mabey, in Flora Britannica, points out that watercress (Rorippa nasturtium-aquaticum) “is the only British native plant which has passed into large-scale commercial cultivation scarcely altered from its wild state”, although for “state”, he clarifies that this should be “states” as there are ten other related species and hybrids, of which three are the main commercial varieties.

I hadn’t appreciated the cultural mark made by watercress down south until I read about it in Flora Britannica – lots of place names in England with “Kers” or “Kes” as a prefix relate to cress-growing. It was so important in Victorian times that special railway lines, the “Watercress lines” were established to take the crop to London (the name has stuck until today for some lines in Hampshire and Lincolnshire).

The aggregate of related species is very widespread in the wild, all across England, Wales and Ireland, and in southern and western Scotland and up the east coast to the Moray Firth and Inverness. The New Atlas reports that the relatively recent untangling of the different species and hybrids (in the 1950s) means that it is difficult to be definitive about any trends in water-cress in Britain. Although there have been some losses since the original Atlas in 1962, it is also clearly still under-recorded in many areas (i.e. no one has been to look for it properly!).

Regular readers will know that I am not averse to a free meal from the wild [Spring posts, passim], but water-cress is an edible wild plant that I avoid, as it comes with the risk of picking up and becoming infected by larvae of the liver fluke Fasciola hepatica, which has a complicated life-cycle including a stage as a parasite in a pond snail, then emerging to live on waterside vegetation (like water-cress). From there, grazing animals (or wild food eaters) can ingest them, and the life cycle is completed in the gut of the host (sheep, cow, foodie, etc) where the larvae damage the liver before emerging in “droppings”. No thanks... there’s lots of other stuff out there to eat! But thanks anyway to the water-cress and its liver flukes for giving me another opportunity to talk about parasites (remember the cuckoo bees from earlier posts? And the cuckoo?).