Wild Flavours of England | Miles Irving, Forager

so I must say I'm I'm slightly out of my comfort zone um I'm kind of used to introducing people to this subject of plants and wild places and the things you can eat by wandering through those places and and uh just pointing things out the thing is I mentioned I mentioned this over breakfast and and uh somebody just said to me "What what you need to remember in this place is that you're just you're just dealing with with an awful lot of goodwill." And um I really think that's true so I'm just going to introduce my story to you to just give some background on how I came to be foraging for a living and gathering wild plants as a job which is I have to say it's my dream job and uh I'm very satisfied to be doing that um it all started when I was about six years old my grandfather uh took me out one morning um it was quite a cold winter of morning and um he knew something about the wild mushrooms that grew in the land um surrounding his house so I remember stepping outside the door i can't remember if I saw it first or if he pointed it out but we're looking across the field and there's this strange object that's a different color to the grass sort of about 150 yards away um and either way we started looking and walking towards it he knew what it was and I didn't and we got closer and closer and gradually this shape became clear um what it was was a huge parasol mushroom about this size um and it really was you know shaped like an ornate beautiful um ladies parasol and he said you know you can eat that we we're going to we're going to get that on the way back and we'll eat it and then we went right into the woods and you know you might think he'd stage managed it to make sort of the maximum impression on a small child um but he wasn't that kind of person i know he didn't do it but the next two mushrooms that we found one was a one was a a deep purple mushroom with a really sweet kind of mealy smell so it looked amazing it smelled amazing um and then a couple of minutes later we found um that was called a wood blew it by the way a couple of minutes later we found something called an ivory clittery it's it's a sort of an aqua blue on the top and it smells very very strongly of an when we took it back to the house later we I found out it tastes strongly of an too so that was my kind of initiation into foraging and um the thought that really got implanted in my mind during that experience was something which has pretty much stayed with me um ever since and has sort of guided the the uh the interest that I've sort of quest to discover wild foods um and it is there is treasure in the woods and fields i think that thought just stuck that day and a few days later we just moved to Sufffort which is where I was doing that uh in the south of England doing that uh outing with my grandfather and um the next few days I started at a new school and we're supposed to catch the bus home from school but I didn't do that i skipped the bus and wandered across the fields home and um found some more of these parasol mushrooms and some horse mushrooms and just turned up at the door carrying this um this great edible bounty everybody's fretting where have you been where have you been i said never mind about that look at this and uh um my mom was slightly nervous but had enough confidence that we we we cook the stuff and ed it um and you know it's that sense that there is there is stuff out there to be discovered um I must say I learned some other plants i learned about the wild water crest near there i learned about the elderberries that my grandfather made into wine and the blackberries that my grandmother made into jam and there were nuts in the in the woods but I was a bit of a sort of mushroom um guy mostly uh for the foraging I did for the next few years but this constant thought irritated me for years that there were more um of these these kind of treasures um to be found and I think the really poignant thing is how how my grandfather had had uh arrested my attention well he hadn't really taken me out and and these things had arrested my attention we're talking about treasure the fact that we're not all uh using that stuff and we don't know about that stuff suggests it's it's kind of hidden in some sense and yet it's not there was that mushroom on the field it was perfectly visible all of these mushrooms were very visible in the woods and most of the stuff that I gather now is is blatantly visible a lot of it people just walk on top of it so what is it that's that's hiding it and I think it's that attention grabbing thing that that sort of uh sums up what happened to me um my attention was focused on that so the things are hidden just because we don't attend to them we can see them we can probably even smell them so uh that's one thing but then again the other thing that hires them is just the value that's put on them because we think it's just weeds it's just plants so on and so on and uh the value that's put on the um ingredients that we do eat it's interesting sometimes to ask why do we value that you know oysters used to be peasant food years ago then they became scarce suddenly now oysters are seen as a a gastronomic delicacy and so on um and the process that we've gone through um in discovering some of these plants and taking them to restaurants that has been the the sort of most poignant thing you know because there's been wild food and and foragers for years um sometimes though that's had a bit of a kind of quaint image attached to it a bit wacky a bit eccentric um but the point about what's happening now is these ingredients are being um placed in the in the top restaurants in the world alli my wife and I we started inviting friends around uh to have supper with us and I think it was it was like that first experience again that I'd had as a child this sense of discovery only this time it wasn't just the plants but it was like people eating together and we'd bring wild sorrel in we looked for weeks for wild sorrel i had this book by uh Kuchio um and it was just like 15 plants in that book um and we were just going through them going "Let's find all of these." We had our wild flower book and lots of countryside but it took us ages to find a wild soul so when we finally did we're like we've cracked this and we said come around and eat and we just cooked this simple recipe from the Kuchio book i think it was wild sorrel soup i think we had eight or nine guests and just the sense of awe and wonder that everybody had they said "So seriously you went out today and you just found this stuff and you cooked it." Uh it was it was like a celebration it felt like a kind of secret garden that we'd all wandered into and uh you know you just felt like you were tapping into something that everybody should know about and that people used to know about so we kept holding these sort of wild food dinner parties uh every time we discovered something new and um we had some great journeys to different places to try and find things only to come home and find out they were growing in the next door neighbor's garden that was funny there's definitely a parable in that one I think um but then one day we just wandered into uh a restaurant in Canterbury and we fancied a bowl of soup it was the wild garlic season so we've been eating wild garlic non-stop for weeks and it says soup of the day we said "What's the soup of the day?" They said "It's wild garlic." And we went and this guy was obviously deeply offended he said "What's the matter it's really nice you should try it." We said "We know it's really nice we have tried it every day for the last two weeks we fancy something else." He said "Stay there." Disappeared into the kitchen went and got the chef what had happened was somebody had bought a bag of wild garlic in and uh they had made this batch of soup and they weren't going to be able to make anymore because they didn't know who this fellow was and uh and he said "Look can you get us some of these ingredients?" And we said "If you like." So I turned up sluggishly a couple of days later with a bag of wild garlic there you go and he said "Great." He grabbed it out of my hands he said "What else can you get?" I said "Well maybe this maybe that." So uh and then I wouldn't come in for a few weeks and he'd say "Where have you been we've got to you know I mean I normally do think about ideas to try to make money but for somehow I just was a little while later I said um and so people should as the penny was beginning to drop I said uh do you have any like-minded chef friends he said "Yes I do." So he gave me four phone numbers one of them was Steve Harris at the sportsman you might have heard of um and suddenly I had five customers to go with him a little while later we're up into uh our first restaurant in London it's all gone from there we have probably about 50 um customers in London now this is this is called Black Nightshade right everybody goes nightshade cuz well at least if you're English speaking we have a plant called deadly nightshade and everybody's very very nervous about that um but I discovered this just because I was waiting through books in uh an ethnobotanical library at Q Gardens and I got this whole book on it and it was uh it was called undiscovered crops or something like that um it turns out this thing's been grown for uh greens in Australia Africa and the United States but anyway yeah cheers like this i found this outside if you want to take this so Ren has just given me this this is a wild pea and you can eat these flowers they they taste like peas they're amazing they're very beautiful and it's funny because the sweet pea that grows in your garden tastes of nothing um but these taste fantastic but the thing about it is it's it's a plant that has a very it's in the same family if you're nervous about nightshades can I point out you eat red nightshade all the time although maybe not here there's a tomato and potatoes and night shades too so it's a very good family for food but this this little berry here tastes something like between a tomato and a melon is completely overlooked and uh one of the thoughts I often have is why have we just uh cowtow to to to what has been introduced in the in the way of plants for us um why for example do we have a tomato that is bred from a tiny little um South American red berry why didn't we look at this and think we'll turn that into something else um and one of the key things that I've really tapped into in the last few years is just how many flavors there are in the wild that um certainly in Great Britain and actually there's a lot of the same flavors here in Denmark um which are so rich uh which are so versatile and some of these flavors overlap into um things that you would actually expect to be exotic things that you would expect to get from another country so anyway there's this there's in there you have an Alexander seed i'm going to talk through them very briefly alexander seeds in a little packet that's a seed that's a bit like pepper it's like pepper but without the uh the heat but it's got some of the aromatic qualities to it um you have a hogweed seed little envelope in there yeah that's in the little plastic domes hogweed seeds have this kind of cardamon orangey flavor and a lot of people are using them on dishes that that that have oranges um in them um you also have mello there which is oh now yeah you have mello in there which has the same flavor as tonka beans if anybody's used that it's a kind of vanilla almondy sort of flavor um and then you have one of my favorites which is meadow again that's that's kind of almondy but with a very distinct um flavor all of its own which is which is a great plant that comes out in the summertime and the thing is we've just been sending these flavors out to restaurants and going "What do you think what have you done with it?" We get that fed back to us and then we put it back out there so these guys have used it for this these guys have used it for that and then it comes back again and we just this kind of loop feedback loop of information and discoveries and um we just feel like it's one great big wild food laboratory that's going on um guys like NMA the guys in London the guys all over the UK um that are using these products and this one Seastaster now I don't know how long guys have been using it in Europe it's like with a lot of these things we we kind of thought we discovered something no one was using and then you find out this guy over here has already discovered it but that's great there's nothing new under the sun but what we're trying to do anyway is just get these back into people's uh consciousness and their attention this plant um as far as I'm aware was not used in in in the UK um up until very very recently it's now being sold in a supermarket now I'm slightly ambivalent about that because it's you know it's a monoculture how they're producing it but it's incredible you go in the Waitro supermarket they've got sfire they've got this one um and just to refer to this thing about the wildness of of of these plants and the land that they come from someone told me last week that on the Sowway FTH up in Scotland the land is extending dramatically but it's all salt marsh so it's not cultivatable land this is all salt marsh it's all producing plants like this like the sandfire like the sea purse land so there's an incredible productivity to to wild land that's there that's completely uninterfed with uh and down south we've got this situation where they're stopping trying to put sea defenses in and they're removing the seaw wall so on the other hand now the land that has been farmed is being encroached upon by a salt marsh so our our productivity of this plant with really no effort other than removing seaw walls um is is greatly uh increasing which is which is an amazing thing for a plant that's been overlooked um for so long and just make I think um I think one of the major points which I just need to say uh which is so amazing with these type of foragers is that these are not plants these are spices these are flavors we are here in Denmark we're Protestants you are Protestants we're boring we eat one sub one plate of food in silence and spices is exotic that's from the other part of the world where people are brown and there's lots of sun and these people are showing us that spices are right below us there's a whole new world to be discovered and this is truly one of the major major um wonderful things that these foragers are doing this is the thing that we need to be open we need to see it as spices it's not just plants the plant is a seed that that seed might be spicy i've tasted seeds for miles that taste like coriander coriander you know plants are grow on beaches that taste like coriander imagine that going there in early spring it's cold and you taste coriander on a beach in Denmark you're used to it from Mexican cuisine or perhaps in Asia these people are bringing this wonderful world to us and we just need to kind of tap into that world that we are a spicy nation i'll just tell you about this one and I'm going to shut up yeah and then time is out that's it so this one here I'd like to show you the root but I didn't have a picture of it this is called Wood Havens or Herb Bennett think about this it's amazing because the root tastes precisely like cloves and this I've been thinking about this spice subject and and and the fact that back in England spices became this big status symbol so you had to have them because you could afford it and nobody else could so that meant we went out looking for trade in in foreign lands we tried to establish these trade routes which became inadvertently the British Empire so we went out we we basically paged people's countries all kinds of iniquitous behavior fortunes were lost and made and I just think that's incredible because one of the first spices people went for was the clove this flavor was in our heads right under our noses all the time we didn't need to go anywhere thank you man woo should I hand that round there's only about 8 12 berries so okay