Edible Seashore: River Cottage Handbook No.5

For Trish

Contents

Starting Out

Foraging Safely

The Rule Book

The Flowering Plants

The Seaweeds

The Molluscs

The Crustaceans

Recipes

Useful Things

Who can resist the great primal, elemental pull of the sea? Even if you’re no sailor, it’s a near certainty that you have been drawn to the sea’s edge at some point in your youth, to stand on the brink of the vast ocean, and dabble on the margins of our known universe: our shores.

Childhood memories of building sandcastles, rummaging in rock pools and splashing in the surf stay with us like little else. Whether netting plump prawns in a weedy rock pool, or plucking weed itself, silky and wet, from the fringes of a reef, or hauling in a crab pot with hope in my heart, these salt-scented, windswept, sand-encrusted endeavours have imprinted themselves on my mind with particular clarity. For me, those precious moments have been equally nourishing in adulthood. And just as they are always a pleasure to recall, they are also a pleasure to repeat, as often as time allows.

This is a phenomenon that John Wright, the author of this brilliant little book, understands well. The Edible Seashore foraging days that he leads at River Cottage are among the most popular of all our events and he puts this down to the fact that they allow people to escape into that wonderful, truly wild, yet accessible world where the sea meets the land. It’s the ultimate antidote to the daily grind.

Take a group of adults out of their work environment, give them some buckets and nets and let them go paddling among the rock pools, and they invariably have a whale of a time. Foraging allows you to leave behind your humdrum concerns and routines and inhabit a world full of fresh air, foaming spray and genuinely exciting discoveries. The fact that so many of them are edible – delicious even – is the great and under-appreciated bonus.

There is no better companion on such a jaunt than John. This is not his first River Cottage book. If you own a copy of his volume on mushrooms, you will know that he is not only a great expert on mycology, but one of the most engaging and amusing writers on the subject. Within this new book you will discover – what you may already have suspected – that the breadth of John’s knowledge and the width of his wit and wisdom go way beyond our fungal heritage. He is just as much at home with estuarine mud, golden sand, or salty water between his toes as he is with the bosky forest floor beneath his boots.

The fact is that John’s knowledge of wild foods across the board is greater than that of anyone else I know. But, as with mushrooms, the delight of this book is not only the erudite precision with which he selects from his vast store of knowledge, but also in the sheer joy, the sense of wonder and fun, with which he puts it across. You know that few people will get quite as much pleasure from stumbling on, say, a good thick cliff -top run of Alexanders as John. But when he describes its taste, its surprising role in our history, and a nifty way for you to prepare and taste it at home, then all that fun and excitement is yours for the taking.

The result is that even the armchair forager can take much pleasure from this book. I’m convinced, though, that it will inevitably lure most of you, sooner rather than later, down to the coast. If you are even remotely interested in our culinary heritage, then you must. As he reveals in the pages that follow, there is a wealth of delicious food to be found on the strands, reefs, mud flats, cliff tops and marshes of Britain’s glorious and varied coastline. Shellfish and crustaceans, leafy greens, herbs, flowers and seaweeds are waiting to be discovered.

Gathering wild foods is one of the most satisfying and energising projects a person can undertake and doing so by the seaside – rain-whipped, salt-scoured, sun-baked or otherwise – is foraging at its most carefree and joyous. Nevertheless, it would be disingenuous to suggest that foraging is always straightforward and easy. You need to have more than an inkling of where to go, what to look for, what to avoid, and what to do with the wild foods you find. And with all that in mind, John has risen admirably to the task of producing a truly practical guide.

This handbook is meant to find its way into pockets and rucksacks. Taking this book with you is about as close as you can get to actually having John walking alongside as you comb your chosen beach. These pages are packed with indispensable advice and information, from clear photographs of the hole a razor clam forms in the sand, to instructions on how to create your own first-rate shrimp net. John even makes a good fist of unravelling the unremittingly complex laws and lore that relate to walking along, and taking things from, our seashores.

River Cottage HQ is situated on the Devon-Dorset border and down here we have access to some of the most beautiful, clean and richly populated shores in the country. We are particularly lucky, I’ll grant you, but I can’t emphasise enough that seaside foraging is a pleasure that’s open to all of us. We are blessed throughout the UK with a stunning and varied coastline, which is largely well looked after and usually accessible to walkers, bathers and foragers. Even if you don’t live very close to the sea, nowhere in the land is more than about 70 miles distant from it. If you’re feeling a little jaded or in need of some fresh inspiration, perhaps it’s time for a trip to the beach? You could be amazed at what you find and, as everyone knows, there’s nothing like the sea air to give you an appetite...

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, East Devon, May 2009

We are blessed in these islands with a vast and fruitful coastline yet few of us collect for ourselves any of the abundant edible plants and animals that can be found there. It is a very anthropocentric view to consider that the food plants and animals that are left uncollected around our shores are wasted, but it is certainly true that countless tons of vegetables, seaweeds and animals that could be gathered and eaten without any noticeable effect on the populations concerned are left to ‘rot on the vine’. The aim of this book is to encourage the careful collection of some of this bounty.

Collecting shellfish near my childhood home in Portsmouth was a regular family pastime led by my father; he was a keen fisherman and, as the son of a Lowestoft trawler skipper, one who had fishing in his blood. I learned most of my seaside plants and seaweeds many years later in the springtime when mushrooms (my second foraging love) were scarce. I would roam the coastal paths of the West Country with my Food for Free and my Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe in my hand. Now, if I ever need to find wild food reliably and in abundance the seaside is my first destination. There is just so much to be found there.

I have imposed some limits on what to include in this book. Generally speaking everything described here can be gathered from somewhere between the top of a seaside cliff to out to sea as far as waist deep on a low spring tide. You might need to get wet to collect some of what is described here but not too wet and you won’t need a boat. The plants in this book include strictly maritime species but also a few that are particularly common by the sea. Many plants which are found just as commonly inland have been excluded – one of my favourite seaside foraging spots provides blackberries, elderflowers and horseradish, but these species are not covered here.

The last time I caught a proper fish (apart from inadvertently in a crab pot) was in 1960 – a small whiting if you are interested. With this level of expertise established I have decided to avoid mentioning fish entirely. All the animals in this book are generically called ‘shellfish’, a term which covers the molluscs (Cockles, Mussels, Oysters, etc.) and crustaceans (Crabs, Lobsters, Prawns, etc.). Some creatures that one might expect to be here, such as ormers, scallops, sea urchins and crayfish, have been omitted either for conservation reasons or because they are too hard to catch in shallow water. A few likely plants are also missing – the sea pea, for example, is edible in small quantities but sufficiently rare to put it out of bounds and sea campion, although you can eat it, just doesn’t taste very nice.

All the techniques in this book for catching or finding shellfish I learned over the years for myself or from fishermen friends. One thing I have found is that there are as many methods and variations of methods as there are fishermen, and every time I talk to someone new I learn something new. I have not been able to include everything I have discovered and I certainly have not discovered everything there is to know. Do not be disappointed if your favourite trick for catching your prey is missing.

The instincts for foraging and hunting are deep within us all and we have lost much in failing to fulfil these needs. I would ask you to enjoy your days wandering and paddling by the sea, looking for your supper, but I know I do not have to; such pleasure is written in your genes.

Conservation

We are so far from our food these days. We seldom have to think of where it comes from or how it got to our kitchen (though things are improving). A bag of Prawns from the supermarket freezer is just a commodity, a fuel to be mixed with other fuels to produce a passable dish for the table. But spend a couple of hours with a shrimp net and the resultant meal is an occasion. In foraging, the natural order is restored; a relationship, albeit an asymmetric one, between gatherer and gathered is established. We come at last to truly value food and to understand how hard it can be to come by.

To the forager and the hunter the seasons are a matter of great importance; the weather and, at least where the subjects of this book are concerned, the tides, an intimate part of everyday life. Most importantly the collector quickly gains an understanding of living organisms and will learn of the problems and pressures they face. It is my belief that anyone who enjoys this close a relationship to the natural world will seek to protect it. As Richard Mabey suggests in his seminal Food for Free, if they see a threat to a wood, a meadow, a beach, they will take it personally.

I am often asked if it is entirely appropriate for anyone in this overpopulated world to plunder the wild for food. Which is, when one considers it, an extremely odd question. A moment’s reflection will reveal that foraging, together with hunting, is the only natural way that a human being can obtain sustenance. All other methods of acquiring food, from supermarket ready-meals via farmers’ markets all the way to the virtuous allotment garden, are a matter of human artifice. To live the truly natural life one has to forage.

Implicit in the question is an assumption that cultivation is somehow less morally suspect – when, clearly, cultivation has its own massive environmental impact. If one grows a field of soya beans one must first kill everything that was growing there before, and then continue to deny that area of land to any competing organism. As knock-down arguments go this is not a bad one, though nothing, of course, is ever that simple. Nevertheless, I think it is a good starting point and the presumption that we have a moral right to collect food from the wild, a birthright even, can be maintained.

When it comes to asserting that right the careful forager will judge every species and every situation individually and make a judgement. This judgement must be based on a knowledge of an organism’s biology, ecology and conservation status.

There is the argument that this is all very well, but what if everybody went foraging? This has no moral weight. It is not immoral, though it may be unwise, to visit Swindon on Tuesdays – but if everybody did it there would be a major crisis. It would be a minor ecological disaster if everyone picked as much Sea Beet as they could find – but, like the Swindon Catastrophe, it is simply not going to happen. Ultimately, that best distributed commodity, common sense, must be employed.

If, for example, a plant is moderately rare, one could only feel justified in removing, carefully, a leaf or two from each specimen, and then only occasionally, while checking to make sure that there was no evidence of someone else having done the same. Some species are so rare that one must avoid disturbing them at all and eating them would be out of the question. Most (though not all) of the species in this book are common and it would require much dedicated foraging by large bands of foragers for any problem to arise. Those problems that do occur when wild food is gathered are almost invariably the result of commercial, and often mechanised, harvesting. The individual, collecting for personal use, will pick things individually and not resort to damaging practises such as dredging. For once the individual is in control of the source of their food and able to make informed decisions.

There is one moral trap that someone concerned with species conservation may fall into, and that is the sin of what might be termed ‘environmental colonialism’. This takes the form of refusing to gather something locally, yet happily buying the same plant or animal collected in questionable circumstances in another country. Importing food while exporting environmental damage.

These are general suggestions for those who wish to be written among the righteous:

• Only pick a few leaves from each plant.

• Keep on the move when collecting shellfish – pick a few from each spot then look elsewhere.

• Avoid collateral damage to other organisms – walking about carelessly on vegetated pebble beaches, for example, can easily wreck the delicate plants that grow there.

• Return rocks to their rightful place in rock pools.

• Do not leave piles of mud when digging for shellfish – the mud will smother organisms beneath it.

Finally, there is a great deal of legislation designed to protect native species and habitats; details of these, sometimes blunt, instruments can be found in The Rule Book.

The nationally scarce Wild Cabbage

Equipment

Much of what is needed by the seaside forager will be common pieces of household and garden equipment, but to be the complete seaside forager you will need some much more serious pieces of kit. These are the pots and nets needed to catch crustaceans. You can spend a lot of money on such things and you might decide it would be preferable to make some of these. You may also need safety equipment, so do read here.

Knives and scissors

To avoid uprooting entire plants (generally an illegal operation) you will need to cut off the bits you want with a knife or a pair of scissors. A penknife is sufficient for most occasions and it is legal to carry one around at all times. If you feel you need a bigger blade (over 75mm) it is perfectly legal to bring one with you while foraging as you will have a good reason so to do. Be careful though. On my way to a foraging location in Wales, I stopped off in Swansea to buy some new boots. I wanted to wear them straight away and proceeded to cut off the various tags with my 5-inch blade. The shop assistant screamed, ‘He’s got a knife!’ and took a little persuading that I wasn’t an axe murderer after all.

Kitchen scissors are the most useful of foraging implements and essential for any seaweeding expedition.

Spade

Walking around with a spade under your arm can similarly gain you unwelcome attention, though, provided you do not have a rolled-up carpet with you as well, not the sort that invites the arrival of the police. A spade will be necessary for the extraction of some of the deeper Clams such as the Sand Gaper. It will need to be very sturdy and as narrow as possible.

Rake

An ordinary garden rake will suffice for cockling. In Hampshire and Dorset there is a minimum gap between the tines of 22.5mm.

Containers

A bucket is the most suitable container for collecting crustaceans and molluscs – cover your catch with some seaweed to keep