Gathering Food
Sloes, which make excellent sloe gin
As hunter gatherers, foraging for food is part of our DNA. Éanna Ní Lamhna advises on what berries and wild nuts to collect, cook and use for great jam, jellies and gin.
Modern humans first evolved around a third of a million years ago. Until farming developed a mere ten thousand years ago, humans lived entirely by hunting and gathering their food and were hunter gatherers.
The hunting refers to chasing and killing animals for food - men’s work - while the gathering of wild edible plants was usually the job of the women. So, foraging for wild food is in our very DNA.
There are lots of edible wild plants around – but not enough to sustain the world’s population of almost eight billion people. In fact, it was the ability to produce large quantities of food through farming, that allowed the world’s population to grow from- they reckon about five million worldwide, 10,000 years ago to today’s enormous number. Given that three quarters of the world’s supply of food depends on just twelve different farmed plant species, having a knowledge of what plants to forage allows us to have a truly varied diet.
Autumn is traditionally the season for foraging in Ireland. ‑ e Irish word for autumn – An Fomhair – means the harvest, when lots of plants produce food for us to gather and eat. So, this is the season for nuts and berries. It begins with hazelnuts which were so valued long ago that one of the Irish names for a woodland was Coill – a collection of hazel trees. The nuts start to ripen in late August or early September, but you have to be quick or our abundant population of grey squirrels will almost certainly beat you to it!
By mid-September the edible berries are ripening in our hedgerows. It was always said that a great crop of berries was an indication of a severe winter ahead and that providence was providing lots of food for the birds to tide them over. In truth, a large crop of berries points to a good spring and summer with plenty of flowers and plenty of pollinators to move the pollen from flower to flower, fertilising them and thus causing the berries to form.
Blackberry Jelly
Everyone knows the blackberry, can recognise it instantly and knows how good it is to eat. We all have childhood memories of being out gathering blackberries and eating more than we ever put into the collecting can. Jam made from these has the most evocative flavour and nothing beats a slice of brown bread covered in blackberry jam with a cup of tea. But if you use a muslin cloth to strain out the seeds from the boiled blackberries and then add the sugar and boil it again you get the most delicious jelly. If you were to add a lovely egg custard to the syrup and freeze it to icecream, you would have the most delicious accompaniment to apple tart.
Speaking of apples, it is well worth looking out for crab apple trees in the hedges – particularly near old residences which may be just ruins now. ‑ ese are much too tart to eat off the branches, though not for the thrushes – or the wasps – but boiled and strained and boiled again with sugar they make a most excellent apple jelly jam as we used to call it as kids.
We all kind of know that rose hips are edible. We certainly can recognise them – the elongated oval orangey red fruits of the wild rose with their thick skins and their insides full of hairy seeds or itchy backs as we used to know them growing up. But did you know that the vitamin C content of rose hips is four times that of blackcurrants and twenty times that of oranges. Rose hip syrup is made commercially but you can make your own by boiling up the hips – which you have painstakingly cleaned of the itchy seeds.
Then liquidise the skins and boil up with their own weight of sugar.
There are other edible black fruits besides blackberries. The elderberries on the very abundant elder trees hang down in shiny bunches when they are ripe and are loved by pigeons. Gather them when they are ripe and strip them off the bunches with a fork. While they have a rather cloying taste when raw they are very good apparently, when added whole to apple pies and also contribute a crimson colour.
Sloes are the purplish black fruits of the blackthorn tree. They are immensely sour when gathered off the bushes. We used to have sloe-eating competitions on the way home from school to see who could eat a sloe without making a face and spitting it out – a competition I never won I fear.
But then I was far too young to know the delights of sloe gin - I am not now! You gather a good quantity of nice ripe sloes, preferably after the first frosts when the skins are more permeable. As first frosts are later and later each year now with climate change, and you may want the sloe gin for Christmas, you can achieve the same effect by piercing each dark blue sloe with a needle before putting it into an empty gin bottle. When it is half full add the same amount of sugar and shake it well. Then fill up the bottle with gin, and leave for two months shaking it occasionally to mix it all up. You will have the most wonderful potent deep pink liqueur in time for Christmas, and the sloes will now be edible to boot.
“When all fruit fails, welcome haws” - is how the fruit of the hawthorn is disparagingly described.
And maybe with good reason. They have a large stone surrounded by a creamy flesh, which tastes kind of like a sweet potato.
You can make a jelly of it, if you boil haws for ages with a few crab apples for pectin and then strain it. Similarly, the orange-red fruits of the rowan or mountain ash are edible too, when cooked with crab apples and strained for jelly. This has a lovely dark orange colour and is good with lamb or game.
Chestnuts
There are other wild autumn fruit you can eat if you know what you are doing. The guelder rose is a small native tree with very attractive bunches of berries. These will make you sick if you eat them raw but are quite safe when cooked and made into jellies. The black berries of the juniper tree were traditionally used to flavour poitín, but are also used to flavour gin. Crushed they can be used as a spice in cooking things like red cabbage and sauerkraut.
As well as hazelnuts there are other edible wild nuts that can be foraged. Although beech is not a native tree, having been introduced by the Normans, it is widespread now. The three-sided nuts inside the prickly brown husk can be eaten raw or toasted and salted as nibbles with aperitifs. The Sweet Chestnut tree is quite different to the common Horse Chestnut tree which has the familiar and inedible conkers. The Sweet Chestnut has single spear-shaped serrated leaves as opposed to the seven leaves like a hand that the horse chestnut has. It is a native of southern Europe, so the nuts do not ripen here every year. But when they do, they can be harvested when they fall in late October, roasted and peeled and used for stuffing geese and chickens.
So don’t let the season pass without going out and foraging something. It is nature’s food for free, the taste is incomparable, and you will be carrying on a very old tradition indeed.
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