Head Chef & Director of Food • Paul Hogben
Free to When l was a child we spent many summers on holiday in Devon and Cornwall staying on farms, where my brother and l spent hours herding cows for milking. Those were the days when health and safety wasn’t the be all and end all. We could help out with everything from herding to aiding in the births of calves and piglets. Sadly, we always missed the lambs and could never understand why until later in life when we learnt about the lambing season! Days were spent on beaches wading through rock pools and gullies looking for shrimps, crabs, plaice, flounders and the infrequent lobster that we occasionally caught as they hid under the seaweed banks hoping we wouldn’t discover them. They always tasted better having caught them ourselves. Our family foraging habits didn’t end there. In the autumn we would go blackberrying, mushrooming, chestnut harvesting and sloe picking. I didn’t call it foraging until l was much older, but by then the habit was well entrenched and there are few things I like more than heading out into the countryside to see what I can find. Nowadays, it’s the wild garlic that kicks the season off. I live in west Kent and by early May the hedgerows are thick with delicate white garlic flowers. It’s a voracious,
delicious plant. We have a tried and tested recipe for wild garlic soup that’s quite delicious and also make various versions of wild garlic pesto using hazelnuts and cobnuts from a local farm. As June gives way to July, I wait anxiously for the elderflower blossoms to be exactly right to make cordial. We’ve been making elderflower cordial and occasionally Champagne for a few years at home. Foraging is wonderful when you know what to look for; dandelions, nuts, sorrel, nettles, mint, mushrooms, parsley, crab apples, blackberries and sloes – but it’s more than free food. It’s about making a connection to the wild world, reminding us that foods begin with growing something, nurtured by soil, sunlight and water and is the ultimate antidote to pre-packaged, processed food. During World War II, rosehips were gathered for their vitamin C content, and today foraging continues to play a vital role in the ‘real food’ renaissance: after all, there is a no more direct connection between our plates and the natural world.
“Foraging is wonderful when you know what to look for.” “There is a no more direct connection between our plates and the natural world.”
Enjoy! Chef
www.thefarmersclub.com • 19
