FORAGING: Food for free? Very compatible to the times we're living in. Things aren't quite so bad that we need to forage for food . . . but then again, it's certainly a good skill to cultivate in this season of mellow fruitfulness. Just be sure to have a good field guide in your pocket
ANYONE WHO HAS ever spent an autumn afternoon blackberry-picking knows the joy of foraging. That pile of shining, beautifully imperfect berries, with their tart, mouth-puckering flavour - each one slightly different - trumps the bland, pristine supermarket variety every time. But it's not just about your cache of hedgerow treasures. There's satisfaction in the seasonal ritual of the thing, in the absurd contortions you have to get into to reach the fattest, juiciest berries, always tantalisingly out of reach, and in coming home "peppered with thorn pricks . . . palms sticky as Bluebeard's" as Seamus Heaney has it.
Yet blackberry-picking is as far as most of us go when it comes to seeking out wild food, a once-a-year walk on the culinary wild side. With the blackberries all but gone now, and the few remaining ones squashy and inedible - folklore tells us that the devil pisses on the berries in October - we return to the tame and familiar.
But if we do, we're missing quite a spectacular autumnal feast. Sloes, the bluish-black fruit of the blackthorn, are ripe for picking after the first frosts. They make a bitter mouthful in the raw, but a few weeks in a bottle with alcohol and copious amounts of sugar transforms them into sloe gin, the most unctuous, velvety drink, just in time for Christmas. (My friend and I used to keep a small bottle in our locker at school, to enliven our experience of turgid history lessons.)
Haws and rosehips, in the hedgerows now, can be added to jellies, syrups, jams and wines. Rosehips, in particular, get the thumbs-up from "real food" campaigner Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who claims they have a "surprisingly tropical tang, with notes of lychee and mango". Sweet chestnuts are still going strong, too, if you have the patience to break through each spiny husk to get at the nut inside.
But above all else, this is mushroom season. The brackish, damp conditions are perfect for wood blewits, winter chanterelles and velvet shank mushrooms. Bill O'Dea is a man who knows his fungi. The Co Dublin-based mycophagist has been running mushroom hunts in Ireland for the past 10 years, and he advises enthusiasts to also keep an eye out for ceps, edible amanitas and hedgehog mushrooms at this time of year.
O'Dea's greatest boast is that he has been collecting and eating wild mushrooms for more than 30 years and still survives to tell the tale. As he says, "there are old mushroom pickers, and there are bold mushroom pickers, but there are no old, bold mushroom pickers." The message is clear - if in any doubt at all, leave it alone. "It's vital to know the good ones," says O'Dea, adding wryly, "you can eat any mushroom - once."
Even experienced foragers have been caught out. For self-styled "wild man" Fergus Drennan, a mix-up between the edible horse mushroom ( Agaricus arvensis) and the poisonous yellow stainer ( Agaricus xanthodermus) led to a dramatic vomiting attack.
In fact, Drennan has plenty of salutary tales of mushroom-hunts gone badly wrong. He describes how he met a pair of foragers on a woodland path last year, carrying a bag full of mixed mushrooms, selected on the basis that they looked attractive and, besides, squirrels and slugs had nibbled at them, so they must be suitable to eat. Big mistake - what they actually had was a mixture of the deadly poisonous, edibility unknown and edible, all of which they were going to take home and cook up. Drennan warned them off, but other mushroom-hunters have experienced the full horror of fungi poisoning. Earlier this year, the writer Nicholas Evans and his family almost died when they ate "fool's web cap", which they'd picked in coniferous woodlands in the Scottish Highlands. The mushroom, which resembles a chanterelle, attacks the kidney, liver and spinal cord. Evans and his family were lucky to survive.
Strangest of all is Drennan's account of an unconscious forager he discovered in the middle of a bramble thicket. It turned out that the man had carried out an impromptu experiment with a hallucinogenic fly agaric fungus (that's the classic, almost cartoonish red one with white spots: the most common poisonous mushroom); as Drennan says, "he had wanted to see if rubbing a small amount of the peeled red cap onto the back of his head would lead to any psychoactive compounds present being absorbed directly into his blood stream, and was curious to know if this would have an immediate influence upon perception." The answer was a clear yes, the forager collapsed immediately, almost falling on his own knife, and when Fergus found him he was unsure whether he had lost consciousness for two seconds or two hours.
Perhaps it's these tales of near-deadly encounters with weird woodland fungi that put many people off trying their hand at mushroom-picking at all. It's true that many fungi look sinister and distinctly unappetising - waxy yellow outcrops clinging to trees; fleshy lobes nestling among fallen leaves - and they often smell strange, too, of anything from almond to coconut to the foul stench of rotting meat. It's hard to imagine anyone looking at a sodden, black-tipped shaggy inkcap (or lawyer's wig), and thinking - mmm, supper.
And yet, with care, the rewards for foraging can be outstandingly delicious, and a rare treat. Bee Smith is a lecturer at the Organic Centre in Rossinver, Co Leitrim, and she forages in the townlands surrounding her acre small-holding in Dowra, west Cavan. Her advice is to get a good book guide, preferably pocket-sized - or, even better, find a French, German or Belgian person to mentor you and share their knowledge. Why? Well, as Smith points out, food shortages after the second World War turned many Europeans into expert foragers.
That's certainly true of Wolf Harth. Born in Germany, he settled in Co Down many years ago, and since then has brought home armfuls of wild food for his family, including giant, creamy puffball mushrooms "as big as a sheep". Meldweed, wild horseradish, wood sorrel, sea kale - not to mention rabbits and pheasants - have all enhanced Harth family dinners. "People are afraid of wild food," says Harth. "But they should be more adventurous; with care, there is no need for fear. So often, cultivated plants are bland and insipid: wild food has much more character, and is often a great deal more nourishing."
"It's all about getting people to open up their eyes and take notice of what's around them," says Karl Hamilton, who runs "Bounty from the Wild" events at Castle Espie Wetland Centre on the shores of Strangford Lough in Co Down. (Hamilton's tip for the unappetising-looking shaggy inkcap mushroom is to pick it while it's young and fresh. Harth agrees, and suggests rolling them in batter before frying them.) "This is free food. Have a look when you're out walking the dog, you never know what you might find."
Hamilton also introduces participants to the medicinal properties of wild plants. "Willows have a chemical in their leaves which is the same painkiller you find in aspirin, and eyebright, which is found on common grassland, as the name suggests, can be used to treat eye problems. If you know where to look, there's always something to eat, or to help treat an ailment." Again, caution is the watchword here - as Smith points out, "haws have an action on the heart, so be careful if you're adding them to an autumn cordial, and wood sorrel is high in oxalic acid."
Jorg Müller, a medical herbalist, and Smith's colleague at the Organic Centre, advocates using certain wild plants as a mineral supplement. "They often have 200 times the iron, magnesium and calcium of cultivated varieties."
Many foragers approach the wild with the delight of a small child, so it's no surprise to find that their love of "food for free" often began in infancy. But, having been around a few foraging corners, what finds retain the power to truly gladden their hearts? For Drennan, it's the sight of "a vast swathe of dunes covered in bright red sea buckthorn," or possibly the discovery of a giant puffball mushroom - "it has a tendency to grow in nettle patches, so you're kicking back the nettles like you're doing tai chi, stung to bits, and suddenly you uncover a huge one." As far as O'Dea is concerned, it's the beefsteak fungus that gets his mouth watering. "This mushroom exudes a bloodlike red liquid, and has the texture and flavour of rare beef."
One of the best things about foraging is its democracy - it really is open to all. But seasoned foragers insist that with freedom comes responsibility. As Drennan says: "We need more foragers with acute ecological and naturalistic sensibilities and less of the let's-strip-the-countryside-and-deliver-to-swanky-restaurants breed." Smith sees foraging as a sort of "environmental stewardship", an appreciation for the bio-diversity of your own local patch. "Don't strip off all the blackberries, leave some for the birds."
So in a spirit of humility and adventure, and with guide book firmly in hand, maybe it's time to take a walk in the woods.