Those wanting to use more wild-sourced ingredients in their cookery often ask questions like ‘where do I find recipes for …such and such…’. Whilst it’s true that many recipes for wild ingredients do exists and there are large sites catering for precisely this market, the real key to using wild-sourced ingredients in your cookery is to understand those ingredients.
Just like most good cooks will know that you can substitute plain flour with baking powder added for self-raising flour or you can substitute marjoram for oregano or turkey for pork, using wild ingredients is simply a process of knowing your ingredients and their characteristics. Once you know an ingredient, what it tastes like and how you can used it then you can simply substitute the wild ingredient in a normal recipe.
For example, young dandelion leaves are quite like bitter salad leaves. You can use them directly in any recipe calling for radiccio or endive. As salt counteracts bitterness in any food you can also blanch dandelion leaves in salted water and use as a spinach alternative.
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Wild foods such as Marsh Samphire are making their way on to the plates of trendy international restaurants. They join such wild-sourced foods as truffles as culinary oddities and gourmet foods. Are these trail-blazers in a new trend, and is there something more going on here?
In Europe, at least, the Second World War marked a watershed in culinary tastes. Foraging for wild foods became an essential part of survival. Wild-sourced foods often became essential dietary staples for those who could access those foods. It was inevitable, after the shortages of the war cam to an end that people would shie away from such subsistence foods and that commercial agricultural produce and processed foods became the be-all and end-all of daily sustenance. Two generations lost the knowledge of which wild foods were edible and which wern’t (with the notable exception of fruit such as blackberries and certain mushrooms). Consumers became more distant from the land than ever before.
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