Seaweed and eat it : a family foraging and cooking adventure

326 Pages·2008·10.25 MB·English

by  Fiona Houston

CONTENTS
COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
FOREWORD BY AA GILL
1. BACK TO OUR ROOTS
2. THE SWEET SMELL OF SPRING
3. GOING GREEN
4. BOTTLING BLOSSOMS AND EATING FLOWERS
5. STALKING THE SEA GREENS
6. SEAWEED AND EAT IT
7. UTTERLY SHELLFISH
8. MUSHROOM SAFARI
9. BERRIED TREASURE
SOURCES, REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
LIST OF RECIPES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
COPYRIGHT
About the Book
An organic adventure for the whole family
Memoir, natural history guide and cookbook all in one, Seaweed and Eat It is
packed with delicious recipes, wild feasts and fascinating folklore.
From identifying edible and medicinal wild foods – from sorrel to seaweed,
shellfish to shaggy ink caps – to growing a wild garden or window box in the
city, this is an essential book for the family that wants to get back to nature.
If you care about your food and where it comes from, this inspirational guide to
wild food and how to cook it will ensure that mealtimes are always an adventure.
So give the supermarket a wide berth, let the kids get muddy and get foraging!

To our fathers
Adair Houston, 3 June 1926–5 May 2003
Gavin Younger, 3 June 1926–3 September 2003
With love and appreciation
FOREWORD BY AA GILL
Years ago, before either of us had families, Xa and I spent a summer in Scotland
cooking. I was supposed to be teaching local stuff, and Xa and a couple of
others, including Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, were supposed to be learning
something. Actually, we all hung out in a big old kitchen making a mess,
producing heroic amounts of fantastically energetic, robust and occasionally
inspired food, to feed each other and anyone else who put their head through the
back door.
Even after all the years and all the dinners, I can remember some marvellous
soups: Parton Bree, made with little green crabs discarded from the bottom of
lobster creels – Hugh made a rather piss-elegant version with local langoustines;
Braw Bree from a hare off the hill; Scotch broth with prunes; Cranachan with
soft fruit from the kitchen garden.
The point was to source as many ingredients as possible from one glen. I
shot a fat stag in the heather, caught brown trout, made the others dig tatties and
kale, walked up blaeberries. I went to see Peggy Mackenzie, a retired keeper’s
wife, who agreed to teach me how to make haggis in exchange for a couple of
rabbits. With the softest of voices and the gentlest fingers, she showed me how
to make haggis from the pluck of the little four-horned Harris sheep, whose
blood made black puddings, and whose delicate legs we salted. I baked on an
ancient stove: boiled cakes, drappit scones and slow-baked rhubarb jam
flavoured with cloves, and a great peppery black bun. In the kitchen we made
Crowdie, scented with wild garlic, and ate it with warm farls of oatcakes.
Very quickly the food and the place became indistinguishable, merged into
one thing. Cooking and walking, stalking and digging, tying a hook and pricking
your thumbs for brambles, all came together as part of a single experience. It
was one of my happiest summers cooking – an Arcadian month or two.
Xa and Fiona have now produced this wonderfully practical, bountiful and
inspiring book, giving not just a sense of place and season, but adventure to what
our children eat. When we did it twenty years ago, it was for fun; today it is still
fun, but it contains a more important message of care and connection to the land
and ingredients. Most food books begin at the end of the gathering process; this
one, quite rightly, starts at the beginning. I love it not least for its reminder of the
taste of a happy late summer in the Highlands.
Adrian Gill, 2007

1. BACK TO OUR ROOTS
Fiona
XA
Seaweed and Eat It is the result of a serendipitous meeting in a primary school
playground of two women with a love of food and the outdoors, and a large
quota of maternal guilt that our children might grow up with no real connection
to the countryside and where their food comes from. We wanted to create, for
our families, some adventurous memories of childhood, like we were lucky
enough to have, and instil a love of fresh food and cooking along the way.
We hope you take this book as a recipe for outdoor fun and informal eating,
whether you have kids, or are just a kid at heart, whether you are rekindling
childhood memories, or are taking your first foraging steps beyond buying
elderflower cordial in the supermarket.
FIONA
At the time, it seemed like every evening after school, my mother would use her
child labour force of four to pick an industrial amount of brambles to make a
year’s supply of bramble jelly. Harvesting the mushrooms from the field in front
of our house felt like Christmas had come early; we made vats of delicious
buttery, creamy mushroom soup that my father would swoon over. The standing
stake nets on the tidal mud flats of the Solway Firth were another opportunity for
foraged food. We waited until the fishermen had cleared the nets of salmon and
sea trout, then went in and collected from the muddy shallows the flounder that
were not deemed worthy of eating. My mother, who has lived her whole life on
the same farm, instilled in us a sense of place, and her no-nonsense practicality
will always be that little voice in the back of my head, telling us to just get
outside and get on with it, and we’ll rustle up good food however many friends
show up in the kitchen at meal times.
That flounder was, looking back on it, real food to me; picked fresh and
brought home to fry up, not the fancy food heavy on cream and sauces I learnt
on a summer cooking course my mother forced me to go on, thinking that I
would never bag a husband unless I knew how to make mayonnaise by hand.
Her insurance policy backfired when I increased a dress size in just three
months; she didn’t realise that she had given me all the culinary education I
needed.
Anyway, we all left home, no more bramble picking or mushroom soup, we
didn’t really pick much of anything other than picking up take-away Chinese.
My husband, Duncan, shared a similar childhood to me, school holidays spent
tramping the Irish countryside with his mother and his Irish relations, in search
of fish, mushrooms and frockens. My mother-in-law, Charlotte, used to love my
reaction when she told me childhood stories of shooting starlings with an airgun
then eating them after roasting them on the fire.
We spent a decade living in Washington DC, getting increasingly frustrated
with the peaches from Super Fresh, the local supermarket, that were anything but
super fresh; they went mouldy in the fruit bowl before they ripened. Where were
those famous Georgia peaches, rosy and sweet, still warm from the sun?
Despite our frequent wilderness camping trips in the Rocky Mountains and
on an island in the St Lawrence River, my foraging tendencies were put in the
cold storage part of my brain in my quest to climb my way up the journalistic
ladder. Our lives were focused on conspiracy theories and policy platforms, not
wild garlic and blossoms. Then, one spring, I flew home and set out for a dog
walk along the river with my sister.