Man, Beast and Tree

 

The Greenwich Park squirrel community actively approach people in the flower garden.  I imagine they see humans as huge monkey nut dispensers. They are accomplished emotional blackmailers, fixing you with their shiny jet-black eyes and holding their hands up to their chests.

 

In autumn they run around the ornamental pines and cedars that shed their cones at this time of year. I collected some large cones at the weekend, with a view to extracting some nuts. In theory all pines have edible nuts, but some are so difficult to get to that people rarely bother. But I was intrigued, and I wouldn’t need many nuts to make a pesto for one.

 

I put my oven on a low heat and laid the cones on a baking tray. Before long my kitchen was filled with the warm, ecclesiastical fragrance of pine resin. After 45 minutes I removed the cones, which had now opened out slightly. I tried prizing open the layers but could see no nuts, so I twisted one of the cones as if opening a bottle. It collapsed into hundreds of triangles, each with a pocket at the tip. I cut one open and it oozed sticky resin that clung to my fingers and got everywhere. Floating in the resin was a tiny, almost translucent pine nut. I gave up half an hour and five nuts later, dejected and covered in pitch.

 

 I wondered how the squirrels managed to get at these nuts, or whether the tree, after millennia of pillaging, had developed state-of-the-art cones impenetrable to animals and birds. I guessed on the latter.

 

In any case, perhaps I was overlooking the real treasure. Could I use the resin for homemade Retsina?  Some sort of mastic-style gum or liqueur? Google suggested that I use it as a temporary tooth filling or to wax a violin bow, but I haven’t got any cavities and I don’t play the violin.

 

Eventually one culinary application came up. The lumberjacks of British Columbia used to boil a huge vat of pitch and cook their potatoes in it. They would then remove the outer skin of the potato that had made contact with the pitch and eat the inside.

I gave up on the pines after this.

 

THE LONDON FORAGER

Tom Parkinson is a forager by definition, if not entirely by trade. Foraging being what it is, Tom reluctantly earns the bulk of his living behind a desk like most Londoners.  At weekends he runs guided foraging walks, and makes a range of foods and products using seasonal wild ingredients gathered within Greater London.

www.LondonForager.com

Lets Forage

First blog, so I’ll start with an introduction. I live, work and forage in London, where I grew up and where I returned to live five years ago. It’s not the most obvious foraging ground, and our website www.londonforager.com (still in development) is a stab at providing a realistic foraging resource for city-dwellers with a surplus of stress and very little free time. Fittingly, it’s taking us a while to get it updated to the level we’d like, so we’d welcome any help or contribution.

 

This blog will be broader; I won’t always limit it to London and I’ll experiment with some more obscure crops, but I’m not going to waste time turning unpromising ingredients into tasteless but ‘edible’ cement, chewing twigs to eek out vitamins or anything like that. I’m interested in that side of things too, but this is a food blog and anything I focus on will be selected in terms of its culinary worth.

 

My earliest experiences of foraging were picking myrtles in the French Alps with my family using a wide-toothed comb. In England, picking wild food is seen as eccentric by some, smug and lifestyley by others, but to the French it seems logical and obvious. My parents’ friends Andrée and Livio would head out in their cagoules whenever it rained to grab a bagful of Bourgogne snails. I’m sure they didn’t think they were being weird or cool, they were just looking forward to eating lots of snails!

 

I also remember picking brambles on Blackheath with my mum as a kid, but I can’t claim these experiences as the beginnings of my foraging. I spent my teenage years doing teenage things and paying absolutely no attention to the natural world around me. It was at university that lots of spare time, like-minded friends and a spirit of experimentation led me to foraging.

 

Starting with brambles, then nettles, then elder and so on, my friends and I started to acquaint ourselves with the wild foods available. Before long my vision of landscapes changed as my new interest and knowledge separated the green expanse into different species that could be used in the kitchen.

 

That’s what makes foraging so compelling; walking along a hedge and seeing a green hazelnut popping out through a snowberry bush, then tracing it back to a hidden tree that’s full of them. Yesterday I found a staghorn sumac tree. It’s too late to harvest any berries for this year but I’m already looking forward to making Indian Lemonade next September. Having a positive, productive and gently-paced view of the future is very good for you.

 

We’re coming to the end of the foraging year now, but there are still a few worthwhile things around. Jack-by-the-hedge will be about for a while yet, although it’s losing its flavour, and the gorse on Blackheath is in its second flowering. I’m going to gather a gallon or so of petals and make a batch of gorse wine. I think it’ll be my last major forage of the year.

 

I’m consulting a wonderful book by HE Bravery called ‘Home Winemaking Made Easy’. It’s very 1950’s. ‘In winemaking’, says Bravery, ‘simplicity is the keynote’, and his guidelines certainly make it a doddle. I’ll let you know how it goes.