THE CRAB APPLE AND THE GRAFTING KNIFE
THE CRAB APPLE AND THE GRAFTING KNIFE
TASTE IS NOT QUITE LIKE other sense experiences. It’s complex, synergistic, a bringing together of the sensations of a whole range of organs. It might more helpfully be called ‘the experience in the mouth’. The lips and tongue (equipped with the same kind of nerve-endings as the genitals) register ‘mouth-touch’ — surface texture, elasticity, bite. More specialised receptors in the tongue (we call them ‘tastebuds’, with the pleasant suggestion that they can be ‘opened’ by the right titillation) pick up the elemental qualities of sweetness, sourness and saltiness. But what we commonly call taste is really flavour, which is synonymous with scent, and that is something for the next essay.
Scents — unless they’re powerful, or disgusting — don’t catch your imagination when you’re young. They’re not experienced separately from the overwhelmingly seductive business of eating. I was chewing nature down long before I thought of sniffing it, and those childhood experiments with hawthorn leaves and raw chestnuts and impossible-to-digest blades of grass left a kind of aftertaste that was rekindled a decade later.
In my late teens I’d begun spending weekends and holidays on the north Norfolk coast with a group of friends. We bedded down in a converted lifeboat moored in Blakeney harbour, and spent our days playing at being bohemians, birdwatching, sailing and running wild on the vast, mutable saltmarshes. It was all very new, and I was fascinated by the practical view the locals had of a landscape that seemed so transcendental to me. They were still part-time hunter-gatherers. They went out cockling and winkling, diverted the local bus when big mushroom flushes appeared on the grazing marshes, and most strangely, picked wild vegetables from the creeks and sea-walls: sea-spinach, fennel and especially samphire, whose bright green, succulent shoots — they seemed half-seaweed, half-thornless cactus — grew as densely as grass on the intertidal mudflats. Samphire is often called poor man’s asparagus, but I found eating it more like gulping down a seabreeze, full of iron and ozone and intimations of thirstiness.
Eating wild food seemed a wonderfully direct way to get close to the natural world — a way, so to speak, of incorporating it. It also had the kind of higgledy-piggledy mix of science and culture that I’d been in thrall to since my first teenage dreams of writing. There was the prospect of Romanticism in the kitchen and of scholarliness in the hunt, and it wasn’t long before I had the idea for my first real book, Food for Free. I’d explore the tradition of foraging in Britain, and see how it might be practically revived.
The research was bliss. I trawled through old books, and not just herbals and ancient cookery manuals. Wildings poked through everywhere — in fiction, poetry, scientific papers — and I hunted them like a literary scavenger. I raked through John Evelyn’s waspish vegetarian tract Acetaria. A Discourse on Salletts (1699), through learned dissertations on the stomach contents of mummified Neolithic corpses, through Eric Linklater’s classic novel Poet’s Pub, with its improbable recipe for a roasted crab-apple and beer cup, called Lamb’s Wool.
I found the origins of the fungus foray among the outings of the Woolhope Field Club in Victorian Herefordshire. Their Proceedings for the autumn of 1869 describe a foraging expedition by thirty-five of their members (nine of them vicars). They ranged around the local woods and fields by carriage, stopping off at likely hunting grounds, measuring fairy rings and gathering a hoard of edible mushrooms: milk-caps, ceps, chanterelles, wood hedgehogs, parasols. The day ended in the Green Dragon in Hereford, with the exhibits strewn out on the pub tables and a late lunch of the day’s best trophies.
During World War II, foraging became both patriotic and necessary. Vicomte de Mauduit’s splendidly titled broadside They Can’t Ration These (1940) was joined by the Ministry of Food’s own pamphlet, Hedgerow Harvest which moved the Home Front out into the wild, with recipes for the obligatory Vitamin C-rich rose-hip syrup and sloe-and-marrow jam: ‘If possible crack some of the stones and add to the preserve before boiling to give a nutty flavour.’ What a Romantic exhortation for a country with its back to the wall!
But it was Dorothy Hartley who was my hero, and chief inspiration. Working as a pioneering female journalist, she had toured the countryside by bike, sleeping in ditches and collecting traditional recipes from remote farms. Her quirky masterpiece, Food in England, was published in 1954, and is full of historical and sensual gems: stories of the Kentish hop-pickers’ way of cooking hop trimmings; an ethereal blackberry junket made simply by leaving the strained juice in a warm room; a glimpse of chanterelle mushrooms, ‘sometimes clustered so close that they look like a torn golden shawl down among the dead leaves’.
What these accounts and enthusings said to me, in the idealistic mood of the 1960s, was that foraging could put you back in touch with the basic roots of food, with a world of lost scents and flavours. The hunt sharpened your senses, your whole awareness of how landscape and season and vegetation were interconnected. In my field research I resolved to follow the example of the doughty Ms Hartley, and reasoned that anything that hadn’t been specifically identified as toxic (I clung to the Ministry of Agriculture’s official handbook on British poisonous plants like a life-raft) was worth a go. Working on a presumption of innocence until taste proved otherwise, I experimented with everything from acorns and dock leaves to the bulbous galls on a thistle — which, before I bit into their disgustingly acrid flesh, reminded me of small kohl-rabi. That was a bad experience, but there were revelations. The new-potato savour of young burdock stalks; the bloomed drupes and bursting juiciness of dewberries — miniature grapes on cocktail sticks; the delectable marshmallowness of giant puffball, which always seemed inextricable from discovering the great white mounds, like soft standing stones or vegetable squids, at the corner of a pasture.
I was living part-time on the Norfolk coast by now, and trying to fulfil my dream of being a literary hunter-gatherer. For neatly contained spells I would flit from the Chilterns to the coast, and spend my days prowling the marshes like a scholar gipsy, binoculars over one shoulder and a bunch of sea-kale over the other. Back in my cottage I’d lay a formal place for one, clean tablecloth included, and eat the weeds of the day, washed down by a bottle from the Wine Society. Going feral was clearly not what I was after. I was clinging, for better or worse, to that hybrid course I’d mapped out when I was twelve, hunched in my makeshift lab with my bottles of kitchen chemicals, and gazing out at the wilderness just beyond the fence.
But it worked. I began to learn about plants. I started to understand how they worked, where they grew, what conditions they needed, how weather influenced their fruiting. The heady thrill of finding a crop, of experiencing bizarre new tastes, whetted new appetites and new sensitivities. ‘Search inside a hazel bush for nuts’, I wrote in my notebook, ‘and scan them with the sun behind you, so that you can glimpse the nuts against the light.’ And the taste of what I found seemed enhanced by this intimacy. Years later I read Morel Tales by the American sociologist Gary Alan Fines, about the ‘culture’ of wild mushroom hunting in the United States. His interviewees talked about the quality of ‘gatheredness’ that makes wild foods taste different from shop-bought ones, and about the ecstasy of discovery: ‘Suddenly it is there in the shadows. A single, exquisite morel … stands by itself, boldly etched against the edge of the orchard. Awestruck at first, I am afraid to remove it. Perhaps it is the last morel in the world.’ Henry Thoreau said much the same a century and a half before: ‘The bittersweet of a white-oak acorn which you nibble in a bleak November walk over the tawny earth is more to me than a slice of imported pine-apple.’
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A decade or so after I’d published Food for Free I met a well-known portrait photographer at a party. ‘Ah, you’re the man who eats weeds,’ he pronounced, eyeing me as if I were an interestingly gnarled variety of turnip. ‘What an interestingly earthy face.’ This seemed to me to take the idea that you are what you eat a tad too far, and heightened the doubts I was beginning to have about the foraging revival. It seemed to be becoming too commercial, too ecologically careless, and to be increasingly driven by macho fantasies about ‘surviving in the wild’. That was never what I’d been interested in, or thought possible or desirable in Britain.
These days I’m more of a wayside nibbler than a full-blooded forager. I grab single wild blackcurrants, overhanging the water as we nudge our boat through the Norfolk Broads. I like the astringent, aniseed taste of a few sweet cicely seeds, picked as an aperitif on a walk before supper. One late summer I found a bough from a roadside damson bush that had been flailed off while it was still in fruit, and experienced the improbable taste of a handful of sun-dried English prunes. The 1930s fruit gourmet Edward Bunyan used a phrase which perfectly catches the delights of this kind of casual garnering. Reflecting on evening meanders through his gooseberry patch he talked of the pleasures of ‘ambulant consumption … The freedom of the bush should be given to all visitors.’
The freedom of the bush: what a liberty! Not something to be indulged without a sense of responsibility. A couple of years ago in the lane behind our house in Norfolk, I came across what looked like fruit road-kill. Windthrown cherry-plums, yellow and scarlet, were scattered all over the road and being inexorably squashed by the traffic. They’re rare fruiters here, and almost without thinking, I crouched down on the tarmac amidst the puddles and trash, and began stuffing them into my pockets. And in one of those insights that gathering your own food ought to bring you, it occurred to me that this is how many of the planet’s citizens, of all species, find their daily rations. Working the margins. Making do.
My own most memorable times of ambulant consumption have been to do with hunting wilding apples, happenstance fruits that have sprung from thrown-away cores and bird droppings. Their randomness seems to catch all that is best about foraging: serendipity; a sharpness of taste, and of moment; a sense of possibility. I can still recall the trees along a Chiltern green lane that was my apple Elysian Way: a tree sniffed out from fifty yards away, lemon yellow fruit, scent of quince, too hard and acid to eat raw but sensational roasted; another with the bitter-sweet effervescence of sherbet; a third with long pear-shaped fruits and a warm smoky flavour behind the sharpness, as if they had already been cooked. They seemed like time capsules, echoes not just of lost orchards themselves, but of the hortus conclusus as a symbol of the proper relationship between humans and nature.
Thoreau loved wildings, and in an essay entitled Wild Apples he contrives a Romantic fantasy of varieties defined and named not by their botanical qualities, but by where they grow, the moments when they’re picked, the mood of the picker: ‘the Truant’s Apple (Malus cessatoris), which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some, however late it may be; the Saunterer’s Apple — you must lose yourself before you can find the way to that; the Beauty-of-the-air (Malus decusaeris) … the Railroad Apple, which perhaps came from a core thrown out of the cars; the apple whose fruit we tasted in our youth; our Particular Apple, not to be found in any catalogue, Malus pedestrium-solatium; also the apple where hangs the forgotten scythe.’
Thoreau’s genius here is to see in our common experience of the powerful combination of place, time and taste an echo of the biological diversity of the world’s apples. And this diversity is itself is a remarkable conjunction of wild nature and science. All the 20,000 varieties of apple that have been developed over the past four millennia spring from a single wild species, Malus pumila, a tree with very variable fruits which grows in the forests of central Asia. This aboriginal apple, in all its naturally occurring variety, was carried west by human migrants and foraging animals, each of them continually selecting the biggest and sweetest fruits. Then, about 4000 years ago in Babylon, grafting was discovered, perhaps from the chance observation of the way chafing branches can fuse. From that moment it became possible to perpetuate the fugitive and unpredictable forms of M. pumila by implanting their branches on other apple trees. The technology of the grafting knife had ensured the survival of the myriad forms of the ‘Beauty-of-the-air’. And the lingering of the offspring of these varieties by the railroad and the barn means the Romantic forager’s territory becomes a kind of genetic reserve.
