The Tracing Paper

Know your enemy
Poisonous Plants and Fungi:
An Illustrated Guide
by Cooper, Johnson, Dauncey

Plants and fungi can be dangerous. For all our very real concerns about healthy diets, chemical additives and pesticide residues, it’s wild, natural plants that have the potential to cause immediate harm and even death.

For anyone tempted by the delicious and healthy (if you’re careful) bounty of nature, the Stationery Office’s authoritative Poisonous Plants and Fungi: An Illustrated Guide is the single most important book to read.

Forager, beware!

Anthony Worrall Thompson’s recent confusion over henbane and fat hen amply illustrates just how crucial it is for anyone thinking of picking or using wild plants to know the poisonous as well as, indeed better than, the good to eat.

You’d have thought the word “bane”, hardly suggestive of good things, would have encouraged some reflection on the edibility of the plant. Not only did the chef fail to check just what he was advising, so did the editors and subs at Healthy and Organic Living, which published his risky recommendation. Responsibility is essential if harvesting wild plants is to be part of healthy living.

A quick check of Poisonous Plants and Fungi would have confirmed that henbane is:

a dangerously poisonous plant with an action similar to that of deadly nightshade

Fortunately it is “uncommon in this country”, but confusion and misguided experimentation has led people astray in the past:

A 20-year-old man who chewed four flowers to produce an intended pleasant sensation was found lying on a footpath; he became excitable and restless, with a rapid pulse and hot dry skin, and had difficulty in seeing and swallowing. He experienced hallucinations and behaved in a bizarre manner; recovery was complete in 48 hours.

At least this incident ended happily, though the book is full of less happy cautionary tales, providing ample warning to the careless forager. Woody nightshade, false morel, death cap, thorn apple and cherry laurel are just some of the plants that have killed people.

Toxic detail

Poisonous plants and fungi excels in the detail it provides on precise toxicity, likely symptoms of poisoning and known cases. It’s invaluable in informing the forager of the plants that must be avoided (with good photos too) but is also useful in clarifying just how toxic each plant is.

Googling for [poisonous honeysuckle], for example, might give the impression that it’s far too dangerous to grow within reach of children, who may well be tempted by its luscious looking berries. It’s reassuring to read that the berries are “harmless or of very low toxicity”.

Unexpected poisons

Many of the plants we think of as perfectly edible can also be poisonous if not properly prepared or if the wrong parts are eaten.

Elderberries are commonly made into superb cordials, jellies and more, but don’t be tempted to use them for uncooked juice. Eight members of a party that drank raw elder berry juice had to be airlifted to hospital in 1984 after developing severe symptons of poisoning.

Even fat hen (which Worrall Thompson intended to recommend) should be approached with caution. Like other plants of the beet family it contains high levels of oxalates and another substance that causes sensitivity to sunlight and survives boiling. Especially if eaten raw and in large quantities, there’s a danger subsequent exposure to sun causing blistering and ulcers. Personally, I’d err on the safe side and only eat modest amounts, well cooked.

The potential toxicity of potatoes is reasonably well known, but a surprising number of stomach upsets are probably caused by dodgy potatoes without the cause ever being suspected. The rule here is never to eat potatoes that have started to turn green or sprout (peeling and cutting out the bad bits isn’t good enough) and make sure children don’t eat the leaves, stalks or berries.

Be safe, know your enemy

The toxicity of some plants and mushrooms may seem alarming. It is!

However, the well-informed forager can feel confident in accurately identifying the berries, leaves and fungi that really are good to eat, and really good to eat. Wild hops, wild garlic, St George’s mushrooms, ceps, cherry plums, sloes, (cooked) fat hen and much, much more are all too good to miss.

Read this book, know what to avoid and enjoy the safely delectable fruits of the wild.

“Cherries on Tree” at Park Farm orchard
from Ida@Sustain’s Flickr

Recipes Online

Cherry recipes from UK food blogs

Recipes in Print

Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book
Wild Food by Roger Phillips

Mid-July and it’s the height of the all-too-brief British cherry season.

For their sublime aroma and intense sweetness, and for the sake of our desperately declining cherry orchards, do whatever it takes to find and eat some British cherries over the next couple of weeks. We’re losing our cherry orchards at an alarming rate and the only way to save them is to eat more British cherries.

Finding British cherries

Henrietta Green’s Foodlovers Britain is running the CherryAid campaign to promote and support the British cherry, leading up to British Cherry Day on Saturday 19th July. Particularly useful is the directory of Pick Your Own and farm shops selling cherries.

The wonderful and distinctive Common Ground also celebrates cherries within its Orchard Path “journey through trees, blossom, fruit…”

The Romans to thank

Cherries have been cultivated in Britain since their introduction - like so much else - by the Romans, but almost all our once extensive cherry orchards have been lost since the War. Of the 30 to 40 thousand acres of orchards 60 years ago, we’ve now under a thousand acres left.

Cherries were grown across the south and west of the country, with the greatest concentration of orchards in Kent - close to the hungry London market and the growing expertise of the continent - since the 16th century. British cherries are almost exclusively English cherries - though much grown in nearby Herefordshire, I can find no record of cherry production in Wales.

Traditionally grown as large standard trees, harvesting cherries was a laborious process involving long ladders, scissors and sieves. Like other commercially grown fruit, almost all modern cherry growers now use dwarfing rootstock for smaller trees. Harvesting is far easier and the trees can be netted to protect the valuable fruit from hungry birds. A few old orchards survive, such as the illustrated Park Farm orchard, where the custom of letting sheep graze beneath the trees also continues.

Sweet and sour

A little like cooking and dessert apples, cherries come in sweet and sour varieties, though the sour are now very little grown. There are dozens of varieties of both types - the Brogdale National Fruit Collection has 306 varieties of cherry in cultivation, from Alba Heart and Aldridge’s Unknown to Yellow Spanish and Zweitfruhe - all descended from two species still found growing wild in Britain.

Prunus cerasus is the parent species of the sour cherries, while Prunus avium (known as the gean or mazzard) is parent to the sweet varieties. The fruit of Prunus avium can be as delicious as any cultivated cherry but the birds generally get to them first. Legend has it that the wild trees still grow along old Roman roads, where passing Romans discarded the stones.

Eating cherries

What to do with cherries? It’s hard to resist just eating them, savouring them one by one. But the food blogging community has plenty of suggestions for more adventurous uses of cherries, from traditional Kentish cherry batter (better known by its fancy French name, clafoutis - cooked and blogged by Alex at Eating Leeds and Cook Sister!, amongst others) and madelines with cherries to lemon and cherry posset to Girl Interrupted Eating’s inspired Wild Mallard Duck with Balsamic Cherries and Lentils.

Farewell huffkin, long live the cherry!

Another traditional confection, the cherry huffkin - a flat, round tea-cake with a hole in the middle filled with hot cherries - seems sadly extinct. By eating more British cherries, we can help make sure the cherry doesn’t go the same way.

Postscript - The huffkin lives!

Happily, it appears that the huffkin lives on after all. In his travels round Britain with a fork, Matthew Fort tracked down a baker who’s recreated the huffkin - Martin Flynn of Oscar’s Bakery at 3 Limes Place, Preston Street, Faversham, Kent. There’s talk of the distinguishing dimple in the top but no suggestion that it might contain cherries.

The promise of summer fruit Cherry plum blossoms early in the winter

Five months after the cherry plum blossom first broke February’s wintry spell, the fruits are beginning to ripen. Trees in Suffolk are bearing good crops - despite frosts in March, a hot and dry April and unseasonally cold, wet weather since.

Cherry plums (Prunus cerasifera also known as myrobalans) vary in colour from a deep, almost ox-blood, red to pale yellow, with the fruit ripening any time from mid July to late August. A small group of trees along a hedge-line can give a good harvest over several weeks.

Cooking and eating cherry plums

The fruit are versatile and delicious. Taste and texture, like the colour, vary between trees, but most of the fruit are excellent eaten raw. Cherry plums can be substituted for ordinary plums or damsons in almost any recipe, from cobbler to chutney. With a high pectin content, they’re ideal for jams and jellies (the Cottage Smallholder has good recipes for both chutney and jelly). Alternatively, try pressing them for their sweet juice.

Finding cherry plums

Cherry plums are common across Britain, particularly south of the Wash-Severn line (as the Science and Plants for Schools website’s distribution map illustrates), but too often overlooked. By late August, most of the fruit ends up as a jammy mass beneath the trees.

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Hedge Garlic (Alliara petiola) is one of the earliest fresh spring greens of the hedgerow, its bright green garlicky leaves appearing from February and at their best as the plant flowers in April and May.

Otherwise known as garlic mustard or Jack-by-the-hedge, it has a more delicate, but nonetheless distinctly oniony, aroma and flavour than the better known wild garlic or ramsons (Allium ursinum).

Much of the flavour is lost in cooking but it holds its own in a salad. As well as the leaves, the young flowers are edible and particularly attractive.

John Evelyn, in his Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699) - (UK)(US)- notes that:

Jack-by-the-Hedge … has many Medicinal Properties, and is eaten as other Sallets, especially by Country People, growing wild under their Banks and Hedges.

Evelyn knows the herb also as sauce-alone, for hedge garlic works well as a garnish and in uncooked sauces.

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Recipes Online Find dozens of recipes from food blogs Recipes in Print Jane Grigson’s classic The Mushroom Feast Antonio Carluccio’s Complete Mushroom Book

St George’s Day and my thoughts turn inevitably to St George’s mushrooms. It’s the traditional start of the season for these chunky, creamy Spring fungi (Tricholama gambosum / Calocybe gambosa), which runs till the end of May.

The True Mushroom

St Georges may be less well known than ceps, girolles or morels, but they definitely rank amongst the finest wild mushrooms, with a firm texture, appealing mealy smell and distinctive flavour, reminiscent of soil and wood smoke. In France it’s known as le vrai mouserron, “the true mushroom”.

Cooking St George’s Mushrooms

They’ve an affinity with chicken and eggs, as well as those other seasonal Spring delicacies, asparagus and hop shoots. It’s hard to beat a simple but exquisite St George and asparagus omelette. (Or use them in just about any mushroom recipe.)

Where They Grow

St Georges grow in a wide variety of habitats, from woodland to pasture, but are particularly fond of chalk grassland. I’ve found them on sites as various as London’s Hyde Park, Salisbury Plain, Newmarket Heath and on Suffolk lawns and commons.

Picking St Georges amongst the cowslips on the grassy expanses of Salisbury Plain, with skylarks singing overhead, is for me the epitome of the English spring.

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One of England’s forgotten vegetables, Alexanders are at their most magnificent in April, their stately stems thick and tall on verges and grassy banks. Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum) love the coast and grow in greatest profusion within a few miles of the sea, though isolated patches thrive even far inland, often close to monastic sites, where it was once cultivated.

Cut and steam the stems and buds, ideally just before the flowers have opened, for an absolutely distinctive, even peculiar, vegetable, a little like celery or parsley. Alexanders were once grown in kitchen gardens as Alexandrian parsley and are often said to have fallen out of favour with the introduction of new varieties of celery in the 19th century.

Like so many other naturalised edible plants, Alexanders were introduced by the Romans and enjoyed centuries of popularity before eventually falling out of fashion. John Evelyn, in his Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699) - (UK)(US)- describes Alexanders as “moderately hot, and of a cleansing faculty”, comparing them favourably to parsley. Continue Reading »

Cherry plums: a promise fulfilled The fruit ripen in mid-July

The arrival of the cherry plum blossom in late February for me marks the turn of winter, the first promise of the fruits of the summer ahead. Suddenly winter’s drab colours are enlivened by stretches of brilliant white blossom on still leafless trees in hedgerows, at wood edges, across commons and on garden boundaries.

Wherever this earliest blossom breaks the greys and browns of winter, July and August will bring abundant golden or scarlet fruit, honey sweet with sharply sour skin. It’s often said, and repeated this month by Simon Barnes in the Times, that the cherry plum rarely fruits in Britain, but I’ve collected reliably good crops for years.

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