Press
Andrew writes regularly for Fork Magazine. Find out more about them here.
Nature’s Kitchen – My Bath Magazine
Collecting and eating your own food is a rewarding experience, and even more so if you have a professional chef to cook it for you, says Olivia Edward.
Eyes down for a full house,” barks Andrew Sartain as he hurtles through the Leigh Woods looking for mushrooms. He’s one of Britain’s top foragers and I’ve joined him, his Jack Russell, and a group of fellow foodies, for an intro to wild food in the area surrounding Bristol.
You can tell he used to be a chef. He’s filled with an edgy energy and hardly stands still for a second. Bought up on a farm not far from Weston-super-Mare, he’s since spent 20 years in commercial kitchens, got two degrees – one in agriculture and the other in forestry – and spent 15 years experimenting with wild food.
Now he’s back in Bristol and keen to teach people about the wild food growing right under their noses. As well as setting up a wild food box service and
selling his finds at local farmers’ markets, he also runs foraging trips to the area’s coasts and woodlands. “It’s such a great area bio-diversity-wise,” he enthuses. “People just don’t realise.” They soon could. Andrew is bursting with knowledge and eager to share it. I catch up with him at a service station just off the M5 and we charge down to the coast in his bashed up 4×4. Out of the window I can only see dull kerbsides and out-of-town shopping centres but Andrew sees gourmet ingredients: wild horseradish, crab apples and rowan berries.
With a screech of brakes we pull up at Portishead and he sets off across the mud flats, harvesting the area’s salty produce; mostly marsh samphire and sea beet atthis time of year. Next he’s off up the cliffs after some good rock samphire, mentioned in King Lear as “that dreadful plant” because sailors would fall to their deaths trying to pick it. He makes it safely back down this time and we return to the jeep, stopping to pluck a dryad’s saddle fungus off a tree before heading on to the next destination, Leigh Woods, to look for more mushrooms. What makes Andrew different from other food foragers is his culinary skills. He doesn’t just know what to pick and where to find it, he knows what to do with it once you get it home. His conversation is peppered with cooking tips and recipe ideas – pigeon and elderberry pie is the latest, inspired by the sight of pigeons feasting on the late summer berries. He also offers tips on what to do with rowan berries – “make a really nice jelly, good with game”. Or samphire – “I do a wild mushroom and samphire risotto. Add the samphire at the end so it just gets that residual heat”. Or sea lettuce – “Mix it with a bit of olive oil, black pepper and sea salt. Roast it in the oven for ten minutes. Oh my. It goes all crispy and yummy.”
Does he have to push himself to come up with new recipes? “No. It’s natural,” explains Andrew. “I come up with so many ideas I can’t keep on top of it”.
And it’s not just dishes he concocts. There are drinks recipes too. The usual elderflower or blackberry cordial and the more unusual elderflower and birch sap champagne dreamed up while harvesting birch sap in Wales earlier this year.
Possessing such a sound and extensive knowledge of wild foods, he does get annoyed with chefs he feels are just “jumping on a band wagon” and “don’t
know anything about wild food”, but he’s not worried the current vogue for food foraging might lead to Britain’s wild food larders running dry. “There’s plenty for everyone,” explains Andrew. “It’s everywhere”. But if you find a really good spot, you “tend to keep it to yourself” he confesses. Still, we find plenty. At the end of our three-hour taster session our harvest is piled high and waiting to be cooked.
We head to a picnic bench in a woodland clearing and Andrew whips out a gas burner, frying pan, olive oil, garlic, onion and sea salt together with some wild food dishes he prepared earlier: pigeon and elderberry pie, shorecrab bisque, rabbit and pigeon terrine. We eat it off paper plates, the food hot from the pan. It’s so much better than bland supermarket food and also so much better than my previous wild food experiences where I felt I was trying to like what I was given. “That’s because you’ve never had it cooked by a chef before,” says Andrew smugly. And as I sip on the dusky bisque and follow it with a forkful of tender salty samphire and earthy woodland mushrooms, I think he’s probably right.
