Wild Food

For most people preparations for a meal involve a trip to the shops or local farmers market, but for Julia Horton-Powdrill it also means scouring the fields, hedgerows and shoreline around where she lives at Wolf’s Castle in Pembrokeshire for whatever nature can provide. “It can be pretty intensive,” admits Julia “especially if you are picking tiny wild strawberries or waiting for the sea to go out so you can gather samphire but it feels so much nicer than just popping to the supermarket,” she enthuses. “You can kill several birds with one stone. You can walk, enjoy the fresh air and the scenery and gather stuff too.”

Julia says she owes her passion for wild food to her father who was a

country doctor. “He was a great naturalist,” she explains. “We’d always return from a walk with something, whether it was mushrooms or berries, and it rubbed off on me.”

 

Five years ago Julia started The Really Wild Food and Countryside Festival, a family friendly event that takes place each autumn in St David’s, where children and adults are encouraged to reconnect with the rural environment via food walks, talks and activities.

 

Julia thinks she launched the event at just the right time with television shows promoting wild food such as those fronted by chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and survival expert Ray Mears heightening the public’s interest.

 

“I reckon that if I had done this ages ago people would have thought I was absolutely barking but now everyone is getting into wild stuff,” she comments.

 

At the festival local chefs also put on cookery demonstrations using wild food and forming The Really Wild Dining Club was the natural next step says Julia.

The club hosts bi-monthly dinners at restaurants around Pembrokeshire where members enjoy exclusively prepared menus of local and wild food. Beforehand, Julia takes the host chefs on foraging expeditions.

“The idea is to get chefs thinking outside the box and rooting around in the countryside,” she explains, adding that her aim is “to give people an experience they would not get anywhere else”. And it has proved very popular.

 

“The response has been wonderful.We’ve attracted people of all ages and backgrounds from TV people and an opera singer to local farmers and restaurateurs - even one guy from London has joined up,” reveals Julia.

 

So far the club has held two events, the first at Morgan’s restaurant in St David’s and the second at Llys Meddyg, a Georgian Town House restaurant with rooms in Newport. At Llys Meddyg head chef Scott Davis created a menu that included Sashimi of St Dogmaels’ wild salmon with sorrel and ginger and spicy radish and Roast Belly of local wild boar with salty caramel and sea spinach followed by Wild

strawberries en gelee with Bethesda clotted cream ice-cream and crystallised hedgerow flowers.

 

Another dinner is being planned for October and the club will also offer a programme of cookery demonstrations, foraging walks, talks and picnics. And they are not the only ones catering for our growing enthusiasm for wild food. This summer, at The Eden Project, Cornwall’s environmental visitor attraction, they have been putting on wild food talks as well as foraging walks around the outer perimeter of the site near Par.

The events are led by Marcus Harrison, who runs the Wild Food School in Lostwithiel. Marcus moved from London to Cornwall to pursue his passion for wild food and he offers a variety of short courses where participants learn how to make the most of our natural larder.

 

“I get people to appreciate what’s around them and to look at the countryside in a new light rather than just seeing a pretty view,” he explains. He says that we are becoming more receptive to the idea of foraging for food especially in the current financial climate. “People like the idea of being able to be a bit more resourceful,” he says, though like Julia he acknowledges that it is hard work.

“Collecting is very time consuming. Supermarkets do make life easy,” he admits. “It works better if it’s a secondary thing. If you go on regular walks you can find things as you go along or pick things when you are walking the dog.”

 

But he stresses the importance of knowing what you are looking for.

“Foraging for wild food is probably safer than mushrooming but there are still a few poisonous plants out there so you need to know what you are doing,” he cautions.

 

Both experts are also adamant that people should respect the countryside. “We certainly don’t encourage the wholesale massacre of hedgerows,” declares Julia. Wild food should be a supplement rather than something you live off,” she adds.