This is probably because many people are almost entirely ignorant of wild greens. The wild plants that can be harvested (often in your own back garden) and consumed.

Indeed, as soon as April turns into May edible wild plants spring into profusion. If you know what to look for then you can probably spot six edible species right in your own back garden. If you venture further afield, to a back lane, for example then with a little practice you will see thirty or more wild plants that are both edible and, more importantly, good to eat.

In fact there are well over a hundred common plants (many of them considered weeds) that you can collect and add to your own recipes. There are as many rarer plants again so that anyone with enough knowledge will be able to gather one wild plant or another all year round. Even in the depths of winter there are enough wild plants in abundance for you to be able to create a hedgerow salad.

Here I present two recipes designed around and incorporating wild spring greens.

Springtime Fritters

Ingredients:

180g flour

pinch of salt

1 egg

450ml flat beer

300g edible leaves and flowers (hawthorn flowers, broom flowers, gorse flowers, young beech leaves, hop shoots, bisort leaves, ground elder leaves, sow thistle, cleavers, ramsons, henbit deadnettle, red deadnettle, white deadnettle [anything that's to hand, basically])

Method:

Add the flour and salt to a large bowl, make a well in the middle and break the egg into this. Pour in a little of the beer and start to mix. Gradually pour more beer and incorporate more of the flour. Mix thoroughly so that there are no lumps and keep adding beer until our have a batter about the consistency of single cream. Cover the bowl with a cloth and allow to rest for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile trim your greens and flowers and rinse with plenty of cold water. Heat oil in a wok or deep pan and mix your flowers and greens into the batter. Drop spoonfuls of the batter mix into the hot oil and fry until golden, turning once.

Lift them onto a plate using a slotted spoon, drizzle with a little honey and serve warm.

A Spring Tart

Ingredients:

80g of spring buds (hawthorn flower and leaf buds, gorse flowers and beech leaves just out of bud)

150g spring greens (the young leaves of primroses, violets and wild strawberries)

12 primrose flowers

80g young spinach

100ml double cream

300ml single cream

60g naples bisket (or any dry sponge cake)

1 whole egg

2 egg yolks

enough pastry for a 22cm pie shell

60g sugar

salt, to taste

freshly-grated cinnamon

Method:

Place the primrose flowers in sugar to partly candy them.

Meanwhile, wash the buds and greens, drain them then chop very small. Add to a pan along with the single and double cream and bring to a boil. Simmer for 3 minutes, or until the greens wilt then take off the heat. Finely chop or grate the naples bisket and stir into the cream along with the sugar, salt and spices. Set aside to cool.

After you have made your pie crust (use either the short-crust for an expensive pie or the standard pie-crust recipes) place in a 22cm pie dish, add dried beans to keep the bottom flat and blind bake in an oven at 200°C for ten minutes.

Whisk the eggs into the cream mixture. Pour this mixture into the part-baked pie crust and dot the surface with butter. Bake the tart in an oven at 170°C for 75 minutes or until the surface turns a golden brown. Take out of the oven and allow to cool completely before decorating the top with the candied primrose flowers.

I hope that these recipes have given you a taste of how you can use the various wild foods and flowers on your doorstep to make tasty dishes from and that you will now want to find out more about how to include wild ingredients in your own cookery.

Dyfed Lloyd Evans runs the Celtnet Recipes site which specializes in Wild Food Recipes. If you would like to include more wild foods in your own cooking then why not check-out the Guide to Wild Foods that can help you identify the wild foods you can use in your own cookery.

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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.

Wild greens such as sea kale and sea beet, being members of the cabbage family can be used in any recipes that call for other members of the cabbage family (eg cabbage, kale, collard greens, turnip greens, chard and even spinach). They just need to be blanched in salted water for a few minutes to make them tender and less bitter before use.

Common mallow has a taste profile and a mucilaginous nature that’s very similar to Egyptian corchorus and so can be directly substituted to make the Egyptian soup, Melokhia. In a similar vein dried Linden (European lime) leaves are similar to West African baobab leaves and American sassafras and like their culinary equivalents can be used to thicken stews and soups.

Wild fruit, of course, can be used in any recipe that calls for a domestic fruit: jams, preserves, cakes, ice creams, granitas etc. Just remember that wild fruit tend to be a little more sour than their domestic cousins and adjust the sugar content accordingly.

Standard wild greens such as Good King Henry, Fat Hen, chickweed, bedstraw and many others can be used in a very similar way to spinach and work well anywhere spinach would be used. If young they can even be eaten raw in salads.
Edible flowers can be candied (just store in sugar for a few days) and used in ice creams or to decorate desserts and cakes. Edible wild flowers provide an aromatic and sweet note to many dishes and are excellent in salads and as decoration for desserts and cakes.

Young shoots of many wild plants, such as Japanese knotweed and hogweed can be prepared, steamed and eaten in much the same way as asparagus and make wonderful alternatives to this vegetable.

Essentially, once you know what a wild ingredient is equivalent to or can be substituted for you can modify any recipe with that traditional ingredient and substitute-in the wild ingredient for it. So, the question when coming to wild foods isn’t ‘where do I find recipes for this?’ but rather, should be ‘what can I use this ingredient instead of?’ Then you can just mix and match and substitute to your heart’s content.

Make life easy for yourself, rather than hard!

Dyfed Lloyd Evans is the creator of the Celtnet Guide to Wild Foods, a large list of edible wild foods and how to use them. He is also the author of the Wild Food Recipes, a catalogue of recipes incorporating wild foods.

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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.

But the wheel is turning. Concern for the planet has led to increased awareness and interest in the possibilities of foraging and the finding of wild food sources. This is partly a matter of curiosity and partly an increased interest in the recipes of the past and their ingredients. There is also an increased interest in growing a larger range of herbs and flowers in the garden to attract insects (and many of these insect-attracting plants happen to be edible).

This has resulted in increased knowledge and curiosity about ancient food sources and how wild and different foodstuffs can be used. This the ancient Elizabethan trade in marsh samphire has been renewed and samphire is now on the menu. But it doesn’t stop there. Those people who would look for blackberries in summer are now collecting elder flowers in May, elderberries in August, wild plums and hazelnuts in September, and sloes in October — and these are just the common fruit.

Once you start down this road of discovery you find that common garden weeds such a bedstraw, fat hen and chickweed are not only edible but make good vegetables. Rather than grubbing these up and adding them to your compost heap, you can wash them and add them to your dinner plate! Then there are the wild herbs, the wild greens such as ramsons (wild garlic) in spring and Field Mustard which can be found year round. There are even greens such as coltsfoot, and common wintercress that can be found and consumed even in the depths of Winter.

Part of the attraction of these wild foods is that they bring out the ‘hunter-gatherer’ in all of us. It’s part of our ancestry, our heritage and once you get bitten by the foraging bug you will never quite be the same again. You will find that in spring you serve your dinner guests a hedgerow salad made of wild greens and wild flowers, in summer you will have summer puddings of wild fruit and in autumn you have the harvest of wild nuts and wild mushrooms to draw on. Even in the depths of winter there are stored fruit and wild greens that you can use.

Next time you pass a tangled hedgerow or an overgrown verge why not stop for a moment to look at the range of plant life that exists there. With a simple guide and some patience you will even be able to get yourself a tasty meal from those plants.

Trendy restaurants may be scraping the verges of wild foods to make a statement and make a name for themselves, but you as real cooks can truly appreciate the breadth and depth of the range of wild foodstuffs available to you. They will truly allow you to connect to your ancestors for these are the foods they collected and consumed. Keep the ancient traditions alive and try some wild foods for yourself.

To learn more about wild foods, how to recognize them and cook them take a look at the Wild Food Guide.

Dyfed Lloyd Evans is a cook and Internet author who is passionate about ancient foods and ancient cookery. He shares his knowlege on this subject in his Celtnet Recipes site. His reconstruction of ancient recipes can be found on his Ancient Recipes pages.

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If you know what to look for and how to recognize the plants then the wild harvest can provide many completely free delights for your table. What’s more wild foods are truly and completely seasonal and provide a sense of what our ancestors used to eat.

With spring just around the corner it’s time for all serious foragers and anyone curious about wild foods to venture out once more. We’re about to enter the season of fresh spring greens where dandelions, mustard greens, stinging nettles, deadnettles, ramsons (wild garlic), bedstraw and many other edible delights are at their very best.

Here are two recipes that will show-off many of these wild spring greens to their very best:

Wild Garlic and Wild Mustard Greens Pesto

Ingredients:

1 garlic clove, chopped

sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper

150g wild mustard greens, washed and with leaves shredded

12 ramson (wild garlic) leaves, chopped

100g pine nuts, very lightly toasted

100g freshly grated Parmesan cheese

extra virgin olive oil

a small squeeze of lemon juice

Method:

Add the garlic, wild mustard greens and ramsons to a food processor and pulse to a puree. Add the pine nuts and pulse once again. Tip into a bowl and add half the Parmesan. Stir gently and begin adding the olive oil. Add just enough so that the mixture is bound together and you achieve a thick but pliable consistency (a bit like mud). Add the lemon juice and most of the remaining cheese. Season to taste then add a little more olive oil. Alternate adding oil and cheese until you are happy with both the consistency and the taste.

This is best used fresh, but will store for a week if placed in a jar and stored in the fridge.

Nettle Soup

Ingredients:

900g young nettle tips (you need to pick these when the nettles are about 6 to 10 cm tall. May is a good time)
(
900g spinach
(
900ml chicken or vegetable stock
(
3 tbsp flour
(
60ml cold milk
(
4 cold, cooked, sausages
(
3 tbsp sour cream

salt and black pepper, to taste

Method:

Be careful when picking the nettles as even the young tips can still sting. Also only pick young, fresh, nettles as they become very bitter as they age. Wash the nettles when you have enough then blanch them in boiling water (this removes the formic acid). Drain the nettles and return them to the pot along with the spinach. Pour in the hot stock, season and allow to simmer for 4 minutes (add more stock if the mixture becomes too dry).

Set the soup aside to cool then purée in batches in a blender. Meanwhile mix the flour and milk to a smooth paste. Return the soup and the milk mixture to the pot and return to a boil. Chop the sausages into small rounds and add to the soup. Add the sour cream, swirl and serve immediately.

These are only two recipes of the many thousands possible and they feature only two of the many hundreds of edible plants that are all around us in the countryside. Why not begin exploring the culinary possibilities of your own backyard today?

Dyfed Lloyd Evans is the author of the Celtnet Guide to Edible Wild Plants and the recipes to accompany this guide have been collected in his Wild Food Recipes. He also writes articles on wild foods and wild food cooking at Celtnet Articles

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