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<a href=press.php target=_top>Back</a><br /><br /> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 width=300> <tr><td bgcolor=#9DB783><img src=images/spacer.gif width=1 height=1 /><br /></td> </tr> </table> <br /> <b>The Times Online</b> <span class=date>April 2007</span><br /><br /> <b>Go wild in the country</b><br /><br /> Standing in a local supermarket, en-route to the Foxhunter restaurant in Monmouthshire for a weekend of foraging and fine foods, it’s hard to imagine that the brilliantly coloured array of vegetables and fruit wedged into the cramped plastic shelves, each have a wild ancestor. Or that I, even with my farmer’s-daughter pedigree, will ever be able to pick out wild spinach from dock leaves or distinguish a bleeding brown mushroom from its red-capped poisonous cousin. There’s also a sliver of me that is just a little bit embarrassed by my attempt to latch on to the gastronomic trend for wild food and head out to the countryside to play at survival.<br /><br /> By 10.30am the next day, with a bowl of warming porridge in my belly, I’m standing in a Welsh forest with Raoul Van Den Broucke, my stout Belgian guide, and my father (who I have brought along to bolster my country credentials), staring into a basket containing 16 pennywort leaves (a sort of caustic mange-tout), some wood sorrel (lemony clover) and 20 sprigs of hairy bittercress (tasting, but not feeling, exactly how it sounds).<br /><br /> It appears we have come foraging for garnish. But then, it is March and Van Den Broucke assures me the forests of Wales have plenty to offer in warmer months. All sorts of mushrooms including ceps, St George’s, saffron milk cap, puffball and velvet shank flourish here, and ramsons (wild garlic), burdock root and tansy leaves will come into their own in a matter of weeks. Anyway, foraging isn’t about being able survive he tells me. So what is it about?<br /><br /> “Finding new tastes, rediscovering tastes lost to young people,” says Van Den Broucke, who grew up harvesting mushrooms from the local wood and now provides foraged food to chefs and retailers across Europe. “Yes, it is a fashion now, but it is a good fashion. If we look after the countryside and the wild food, we will be able to enjoy them for a long time to come.” And, “it makes life more interesting, there is always something to chew on,” he adds, before reaching out to a nearby Hawthorn bush and handing me a sprig. It doesn’t live up to its nickname - "bread and cheese" - but is tangy and tasty in small quantities.<br /><br /> We head up the hillside to a pasture to see if global warming has provided us with ramsons a month early, but, and to my relief, they are yet to appear. The basket remains an empty embarrassment though, and will tax even the skills of TV chef, Matt Tebutt, who runs the Foxhunter and is awaiting our return so he can create a feast of foraged food with our haul. “Is there anything else we can eat?” I plead, pulling at something that looks a bit like a potato leaf.<br /><br /> “Ah, Matt has some mushrooms I picked two days ago,” Van Den Broucke attempts to comfort my grumbling stomach, but it’s not the same. I want to find my own dinner; I want the deep sense of self-satisfied smugness that will come when I tuck into a lunch that is free in every respect. And what I love about wild foods - what made me spend whole days traipsing through stinging nettles and thorns in the local woods where I grew up, looking for wild raspberries - is their elusiveness and the sense of achievement and pride you gain from finding them, from cornering your prey. Not only that, but wild foods are just cooler than their inbred, pedigree relations. They need no tending, have evolved free from interfering humans and, above-all, they are survivors - the Rocky Balboa’s of the fruit and veg world.<br /><br /> Luckily all is not lost. As we wander back, dad, my saviour, spots something pale and interesting erupting from a pile of logs. “Are those no good?” he asks Van Den Broucke pointing to the huge crop of oyster mushrooms. “Those are wonderful,” Van Den Broucke replies. We begin harvesting, carefully cutting the mushrooms from the bark and cleaning them with Van Den Broucke’s special mushroom knife. A couple of minutes later the basket is looking healthier – filled with eight large, delicate oyster mushrooms.<br /><br /> Back at the Foxhunter Tebutt looks just a tiny bit impressed - “I thought you’d be coming back empty-handed at this time of year,” he confides. He throws the mushrooms, pennywort, bittercress and sorrel into a pan with a little oil and some herbs and ten minutes later, my dad and I are sitting down to a lunch of mushrooms piled high on Tebutt’s lightly toasted, homemade bread and bulked up with a tasty side-dish of parma ham from the Foxhunter’s regular menu.<br /><br /> Tebutt loves to put foraged foods on his bill-of-fayre, not only does it help him to vary his menu on a regular basis he tells me, but you know exactly where it has come from, it’s as fresh as it can possibly be.<br /><br /> “I try to have a few seasonal wild foods always on the menu but you have to put them in language people can relate to easily,” he explains, “so sea beet becomes sea spinach and ramson is known by it’s common name, wild garlic.”<br /><br /> Tebutt, who moved to Wales to start a family, regularly goes foraging with his wife and children and believes foraged food’s appearance on restaurant menus is not just a passing fad. “As people become more concerned with where there food has come from and where it has been, they look for products they can rely on,” he tells me, “with foraged food you can literally say ‘I just picked it up over there’, it’s great.”<br /><br /> But it's a rural trend that could have an adverse effect on the environment. Van Den Broucke is adamant that anyone attempting to forage must read up on the subject or attend a course with a forager. “It’s easy to destroy a crop of wild food by pulling something up by the roots or picking too much of it at the wrong time,” he warns, “you must respect the food and the places where it grows if you want your children, and their children, to have the opportunity to eat it.”<br /><br /> Of course not everyone can get to a wood or forest - if we could, our supplies would soon dwindle. A great alternative is to visit your local garden centre, many of which have an impressive stock of wild vegetable seeds that will introduce some unusual varieties to the dinner table. Across the country wild foods such as oyster mushrooms, wood sorrel and wild garlic are fast making their way on to restaurant menus. So, even committed urbanites can get a taste of these undomesticated foodstuffs, safe in the knowledge that they won’t be sinking their teeth into an unrecognised death-cap or chewing their way through inedible twinberries.<br /><br /> Foraging trips at the Foxhunter cost £110 - £125 per couple with an additional £35-45 for each extra person depending on whether you elect to include lunch, cooked by Matt Tebutt.<br /><br /> An overnight stay at the Foxhunter cottages costs £125 per night, with a two-day minimum stay at weekends.<br /><br /> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 width=300> <tr><td bgcolor=#9DB783><img src=images/spacer.gif width=1 height=1 /><br /></td> </tr> </table> <br /> <a href=press.php target=_top>Back</a>
AA Notable Wine List 2008 & 2009
Perfect Pub Awards : Best Food 2007
Wales the True Taste (Cymru y Gwir Flas) - Dining Out Gold 2005
AA Restaurant of the Year for Wales
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