Do children still munch the new, tiny leaves of the hawthorn the Bread and Cheese their parents and grandparents would call it? Certainly not off the bushes on the roadside, with their load of pollution, but away from the highway should be all, right. This comes to mind on looking over a splendidly illustrated and also informative book called Wild Foods. You'll have seen many TV programmes with hardy souls telling you how many of the wild plants you thought of as weeds, perhaps, are in fact edible. They pull them up and munch away happily. With this book you can look and examine carefully before you eat.
Sticking with the hawthorn, you can enjoy hawthorn and beetroot salad, the leaves being young or youngish, but not merely at the budding stage. It's just a case of two cooked beetroots, diced, half a pint of hawthorn leaves, and French dressing. Serves two. "The taste of the hawthorn leaves is very, light and delicate." And you can go on to hawthorn and potato salad. Soon you will be able to indulge in elderflower fritters. The author advised making a batter, dipping the flowers by their stalks in it, and deep frying them in very hot fat or oil. He demands unwashed flowerheads. And so on to elderflower champagne and wine. There's haw wine and haw jelly, also rosehip wine and jelly.
Masses of carefully photographed fungi of all sorts. Being conservative, this writer will stick with the four known to him, but Roger Phillips, the author is super careful. He acknowledges help from many people and recipes from such well known food and wine writers as Jane Grigson. You're just a bit late for making birch tree wine. He recommends you do it only in the first two weeks of March.
That hardy old annual, acorn coffee, comes up - a staple in war time, and after, for Germans, among others. Apparently if you boil the acorns for 15 minutes, the shells peel off easily and the bitterness is reduced. Dry and roast and grind: "The taste does not resemble coffee, but is quite pleasant with milk and sugar." Beechnuts, he tells us, are abundant "every five to eight years."
They are largely for eating in time of famine, and have even a coffee substitute. He also reminds us of the oil. Big bonus: he tells us how to make marrons glacee. (Wild Food by Roger Phillips, Macmillan, London, £13.99.)