APPENDIX I

Wild Food Plants of the British Isles

Many of these plants would have been eaten by peoples living on these islands since the last Ice Age, when the land became habitable again. As the Romans introduced so many of their favourite plants, foods and flavourings, which were left uncultivated after they relinquished control of England, the list reflects the edible plants growing wild here from roughly AD 450. There are around a hundred plants listed here. There are also edible mammals, birds and their eggs, fresh water fish and sea fish that can be caught from the shore, all of which are indicated in Chapter 1, and all of these would have been eaten by the peasants.

This list cannot be comprehensive; many plants have become extinct in the last 1,000 years, most of them in the last 150. Many more are threatened with extinction. The plants listed are not likely to have been growing in every area of the British Isles, but if there were only a few of each category growing in the neighbourhood, there would have been enough to augment the diet of the very poor. The information on where plants grew, at what time of year they appeared, and what part of them could be harvested and when, would be passed down from mother to daughter. Girls when still small infants would have been taken out to the fields, hills, shore, cliffs and woods to learn the art of gathering. The names, preparation and cooking of plants would have been essential learning from the moment they could walk and run by themselves. Various regions have different names for the same plant; many of the names indicate how they were prepared and cooked.

The following categories are not watertight, as often the whole of a plant would be used, seeds, leaves, flowers, stem and root (as in Fat Hen). In such cases, I have listed the plant only once.

Leaves

Sea Cabbage (Brassica oleracea): Grows on cliffs, and is an ancestor of garden cabbage, though this was domesticated from Mediterranean stock. A strong-tasting brassica, needing long slow cooking; its flavour would have permeated the whole dish and the breaking down of its sulphur compounds would have made the dish smell strongly. I am sure such a smell would then have counted as appetising, but we can only surmise that Anglo-Saxons had a quite different register of aromas that were attractive or repulsive than we do.

Buckrams, Ramsons or Bear’s Garlic (Allium ursinum): The common wild garlic that grows in woodlands, it was eaten raw with cheese and with boiled bacon. One of the first green vegetables in spring. The oil was also distilled and used medicinally.

Calamint, wild basil (Calamintha officinalis): Has an aromatic scent, looks like a small pink flowered dead nettle. Brewed as tea or made into a syrup.

Caraway (Carum carvi): Very common and popular in medieval times, used in cakes and breads, pungent leaves sometimes used in salads, the seeds also made into comfits.

Coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara): Plant used for centuries as a cough syrup and a candy. Leaves made into herbal tobacco.

Comfrey (Symphytum officinale): Used to set broken bones, its Scottish name is ‘boneset’. Also named Saracen root, which suggests it was brought over by Crusaders. Highly mucinlaginous, the juice was used to wash wounds, then the pulp was wrapped in a linen cloth and packed around the fracture exactly as we now use plaster. Comfrey still grows around the sites of old monasteries. Used also as fodder for cattle and horses, new leaves can be eaten like spinach.

Coriander (Coriandrum sativum): Extensively grown in Essex; the wild plant is common there. Used in spice powders and pickles and in curing meat.

Docks (Rumex): Used to wrap up cheese and butter for the market, and with sorrel cooked into a sauce.

Germander (Teucrium scorodonia): Used in brewing ale before hops took over; it clears the beer and gives it a dark colour and bitter flavour.

House Leek (Sempervivium tectorum): Juice used as an eye lotion.

Lamb’s Lettuce (Valerianella locusta): Appeared at lambing time in March and it was picked and eaten as a salad.

Leeks (Allium porum): Eaten like spring onions.

Lettuce (Lactuca: verosa and serriola): Juice dried into brown cakes and used as a form of opium. A medieval housebook of the early fifteenth century mentions the dried juice being given to produce sleep for surgery.

Lovage (Ligusticum scoticum): East coast fishing trade brought the herb south, but in earlier times it was associated with Scotland, where it was eaten as a salad, but also boiled, and where it was called ‘Sirenas’.

Orach (Atriplex angostepolia): Boiled as greens, young leaves used in salads.

Common Orach (Atriplex patula): Leaves are eaten. Useful to add to a mixed salad, there are two kinds, red orach and golden orach.

Charlock (Sinapis arvensis): Leaves boiled; called Corn-cail in Dublin, Colonsay in Hebrides. Turner in 1548 called it Oarlock or Wyld Cale. This is a poor cousin of kale and would have been used where kale failed to grow, boiled in the pottage.

Scurvy Grass (Cochlearia officinalis): Abundant in Scotland, found on sea cliffs and shore, rich in vitamin C. The whole plant would have been used, leaves, stalks, flowers and berries, crushed and the juice was either added to ale or made into a medicinal potion. But as it tasted unpleasant, spices and sugar were added; it was used as a remedy for various ills until in the sixteenth century it became well known as a cure for scurvy and taken on long sea voyages. Then it became almost fashionable, as in London there existed scurvy grass streetsellers.

Here is a recipe of Dr Parry’s: ‘Of the juyce of scoury-grasse one pint; of the juyce of water-cresses as much; of the juyce of succory, half a pint; of the juyce of fumitory, half a pint; proportion to one gallon of ale; they must be all tunned up together.’¹

In the 1650s a fashionable woman began the day with a glass of this tonic, much as we might drink freshly squeezed orange juice. Later, early in the nineteenth, sandwiches of scurvy grass were eaten and a ‘spring juice’ was created, which was a mixture of watercress, scurvy grass and Seville oranges. But it fell out of fashion when the much nicer drink of watercress and lime was discovered. In the sixteenth century when it was realised that it cured scurvy, apothecaries wondered whether it might be the Britannica herba of Dioscorides. In Germanicus Caesar’s campaign of AD 14 across the Rhine, his legionaries fell ill with a scurvy-like affliction; the Frisians seeing this taught the soldiers to take this herb and they were miraculously cured. Gerard described the disease accurately: ‘The gums are loosed, swolne and exulcerate; the mouth grevously stinking; the thighes and legs are withall verie often full of blewe spots, not unlike those that come of bruses: the face and the rest of the bodie is oftentimes of a pale colour; and the feet are swolne, as in the dropsie.’

Watercress (Nasturtium officinale): It was boiled or eaten raw. Anglo-Saxons believed it to be sacred, and it remained popular throughout the centuries; rich in vitamin C it was also a cure against scurvy.

Winter Cress (Barbarea vulgaris): I grow this plant myself as a winter salad, and it thrives in very cold weather; it is very peppery, and called by Turner Wound Rocket, as the leaves were pounded and used as a poultice on wounds.

Chickweed (Stellaria media): Used in salads or sandwiches. Has a slight cucumbery taste. Grows rampant on manure and around animals.

Spring Beauty (US term) (Claytonia perfoliata): Eaten raw in salads or boiled. This is delicious, the leaves are quite crunchy and it looks appealing. It was brought from US early in the nineteenth century, for it was not observed in Britain until 1852.

Good King Henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus): Young shoots and flowery tops boiled and eaten. A poor man’s spinach. The name stems from the early sixteenth century, of course, but the plant itself is indigenous to northern Europe. It’s good to eat if picked young.

Fat Hen (Chenopodium album): Seeds, containing fat and albumen, are eaten. Ancient food plant found in stomach of peat bog men and other early remains. Leaves, boiled and eaten, also makes red or golden dye. In Ireland and Western Highlands called ‘wild pottage’, so it must have been used daily. It is a useful plant in that it grows very quickly on animal dung and general livestock detritus. In Normandy they call it grasse-poulette because it flourishes inevitably around wherever the chickens are. When I kept doves it grew beneath the dovecote. Seeds are also ground to make flour, which tastes like buckwheat. Leaves can also be cooked, ground and mixed with butter.

Beet (Beta vulgaris), called wild spinach: Leaves eaten with pork or bacon. Roots are also boiled and eaten. These leaves are very good indeed, excellent stir-fried in a little oil and eaten cold as a salad.

Glasswort (Salicornia stricta): The poor pickled it, though its main use was for glassmaking as it is rich in soda. It grows in estuaries and salt marshes all around the European coastline, appearing in June. To make glass, the plant was dried, burnt and the ash, then called barilla, was gathered and exported to the Mediterranean. Sir Thomas More (1478) names it in a list of plants that would improve ‘many a poor knave’s pottage … glasswort might afford him a pickle for his mouthful of salt meat’. We now know this as marsh samphire, and confuse it with the rock samphire which grows from cliffs.

Wood Sorrel (Oxalis aceto sella): One of the most ancient wild leaves to be used as a seasoning, as its common names often refer to food. It has a sharp lemony flavour. In Somerset it is called ‘bread-and-cheese and cider’ or ‘butter and eggs’. It was commonly eaten with bread and cheese, but also obviously in omelettes. Its other common name is ‘allelujah’, as it first appears in spring around the time of Easter and was associated with Christian celebration. The name allelujah for wood sorrel is also used in France, Spain and Italy, so its name and usage are certainly medieval. It was also chopped and made into a green sauce or added to soups. There is a connection between the use of wood sorrel in cooking and the term ‘julienne’, which is a corruption of allelujah. When wood sorrel was chopped and used in soups, the leaves would disappear and the tiny stalks were left. When wood sorrel was no longer used, chefs chopped vegetables into matchsticks to simulate the sorrel stalks.

Fool’s Watercress (Apium nodiflorum): Herb used in cooking of meat pies and pasties.

Ground Elder (Aegopodium poda graria): These are highly delicious, they have a strong aniseed flavour, and when young the leaves are good for salads. Also the leaves can be lightly boiled and eaten.

Rock Samphire (Crithium maritimum): Pickled, also minced with butter. It grows on cliffs and tastes strongly of the essence of herbs, very savoury and meaty. It was a huge favourite throughout the Middle Ages and on until over picking and its contamination with lesser samphire, both golden and marsh, put people off the product. Rock Samphire was gathered in the Isle of Wight and the Isle of Man, packed into barrels and pickled in brine, then sent to London markets. You can still find the plant, best picked in the summer months before it seeds itself. It grows all over the beaches in the South of France, but the French are ignorant of its gastronomic quality.

Lovage (Ligusticum scoticum): Leaves eaten, cooked or raw.

Bistort (Polygonum bistorta): Leaves boiled. Easter Ledger pudding eaten in the Lake District at Easter. Ledger, logia, Astrologia from French Aristolochia clematis, plant of best birth. Bistort in The Grete Herball of 1526 ‘hath virtue … to cause to retayne and conceyve’.

Sorrel (Rumex Acetosa): Green sauce for fish, leaves boiled with pork or goose.

Nettle (Urtica Dioica): Young leaves eaten as soup. Nettles also made cloth.

Water Mint (Mentha aquatica): Leaves for flavouring.

Wild Marjoram (Origanum vulgare): Leaves used for tea.

Wild Thyme (Thymus serpyllum): Used for tea.

Wood Sage (Teucrium scorodonia): Used for tea.

Chamomile (Anthemis nobilis): Used for tea.

Milk Thistle (Silybum marianeum): Remove prickles, young leaves can be eaten, blanched as salad, and stalks eaten after peeling and soaking to remove bitterness.

Chicory Succory (Cichorium intybus): Brought here by Romans. Leaves blanched for salad. In France, it is known as Barbe de Capuchin.

Chives (Allium schoenoprasum): Leaves eaten.

Cowslip (Primula veris): Leaves eaten in salad, mixed with other herbs for stuffing meat. Cowslip salad made from petals dipped in white sugar. Flowers make a delicate wine.

Elder (Sambucus nigra): Elder flowers make wine or vinegar, berries make juice and wine, jam, chutneys, ketchup and are also used in cooking in cakes and muffins (like blueberries).

Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale): Blanched leaves in salads, or used for wine and beer.

Salad Burnet (Poterium sanguisorba): Leaves used in salads. Named to distinguish it from Great Burnet (both used as a salve for wounds).

Roots, Bulbs, Shoots, Seeds and Tubers

White Water Lily (Nymphaea alba) and Yellow Water Lily (Nuphar lutea): Both roots were dried, ground and used medicinally, but also to make flour from.

Dittander (Lepidium Latifolium): Grows in salt marshes. The roots were used like horse radish, but extremely hot, burning and bitter.

Horse Radish (Armoracia rusticana): Introduced from Friesland (probably first of all indigenous to eastern Europe) where it was made into a sauce for boiled meat. German name is Meerettich – sea radish.

Jack-by-the-Hedge (Alliaria petiolata): Hedge garlic, used to make a spring sauce, eaten with salt fish. Or used in salad or bulbs boiled and eaten with boiled mutton.

Sea Kale (Crambe maritima): Shoots boiled and eaten in early spring. French called it chou mann d’Angleterre.

Fireweed, Rosebay Willow (Chamaenerion augustifolium): Young shoots boiled and eaten like asparagus.

Bitter Vetch (Lathyrus montanus): Tubers eaten fresh and raw, or tied in bundles to dry, used also to flavour whisky. Gerard likened taste to chestnuts.

Rampion (Campanula rapuncullus): Its white root was boiled and eaten, or finely sliced and used in a salad.

Rhubarb (Rumex alpinus): Monk’s rhubarb used as a standard aperient in place of the expensive imported rhubarb root. Another plant that appears around the site of old monasteries.

Sea Holly (Eryngium maritimum): The blue sea holly which has a huge root which was dug up and candied with sugar and rosewater; its flavouring was used as a chewing gum against plague infection.

Wild Arum (Arum maculatum): Used as a base for salop, but the extreme acidity has to be washed out of the root before the starch can be used. Used as a starch before the import of West Indian arrowroot.

Sweet Cicely (Myrrhis odorata): Anise flavour, roots boiled and eaten with oil and vinegar. Leaves also used to flavour puddings.

Fennel (Foeniculurn vulgare): Roots eaten raw and cooked. Leaves also used as flavouring. Of the cultivated variety William Coles in Nature’s Paradise (1650) said, ‘Both the seeds, leaves and root of our garden fennel are much used in our drinks and broths for those that are grown fat, to abate their unwieldiness and cause them to grow more gaunt and lank.’

Wild Parsnip (Pastinaca sativa): Roots boiled and eaten, also used as pig food and mixed with bran for horses. Cooked and pounded parsnip used to eke out flour in bread. Parsnips improved after frost. Lenten food, eaten with salt fish, mixed with hard-boiled eggs and butter. Parsnips eaten with mustard. Made into wine, beer and spirits in Ireland. Brewed with malt instead of hops.

Cow Parsnip (Heracleum spondylium): Roots possibly eaten but mostly gathered for pig food.

Wild Carrot (Daucus carota): In the Hebrides roots eaten raw. Flowers used by herbalists.

Hops (Hurnulus lupulus): Shoots cooked and eaten. Flowers used to flavour and preserve beer.

Alkanet (Anchusa officinalis): Used to colour cheeses a golden red. Now a rare plant, but sometimes found in clumps at the site of old cheese farms.

Asparagus (Asparagus officinalis prostratus) (Also called Sperage or Sparrow Grass): Used in salads and sauces.

Wild Angelica (Angelica sylvestris): Pink and purple stems and seeds eaten.

Black Bindweed (Polygonurn convolvulus): The seeds have starch content. Boiled and eaten.

Pale Persicaria (Polygonurn lapathifolium): They grow with the corn and are inevitably eaten.

Buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum): Brought from Asia by the returning Crusaders; its French name is Saracen Corn. It was cultivated here as food for pheasants; now increasingly used to make flour from.

Lady’s Bedstraw, Cheese Rennet (Galium verum): Used for stuffing mattresses and for curdling milk, for flavouring sheep’s and goats’ cheese. Used in Cheshire, Gloucestershire and the Highlands.

Wild Celery (Smallage) (Apium graveolens): Eaten raw or cooked. Brought here by the Romans. Commonly eaten right up to the nineteenth century, has a strong and lovely flavour, excellent for cooking as celery soup.

White Mustard (Brassica Alba) and Black Mustard (Brassica Nigra): Romans brought both to England. The Anglo-Saxons loved it. The seeds were pounded and steeped in wine. The name derives from Mustum, the must of grape juice, and ardens, meaning burning. In 1623 Gerard wrote: ‘The seed of mustard pounded with vinegar is an excellent sauce, good to be eaten with any grosse meates, either fish or flesh, because it doth help digestion, warmeth the stomache and provoketh appetite.’ Mustard was made up into balls with honey and vinegar and a little cinnamon and this is how it was sold; when needed, it was mixed with more vinegar. It was particularly collected around Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire.

Fruits

Barberry (Berberis vulgaris): Red fruits make a jam or jelly; candied, eaten as sweets; used as a fever drink or made into a punch. Fruit can be pickled. Rouen was the centre for confitures d’épine vinette. Roots boiled in lye to dye wool yellow; bark used with alum to dye linen yellow. Berberis is Arabic name for fruit. Naturalised in medieval gardens.

Blackberry, Bramble (Rubus fructicosus): Berries eaten, raw or cooked.

Raspberry (Rubus idaeus)

Bungleberry, Bunchberry, Stoneberry (Rubus saxatilis)

Dewberry, Blue Bramble (Rubus caesius)

Strawberry (Fragaria vesca)

Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa): Sloes, ancestor of plums. Makes wine, flavours spirits.

Bullace (Prunus domnestica): Made wine, if kept for long enough resembled port.

Medlar (Mespilus germanica): Welsh brewed an ale from fruits, also cider, jellies and jams. Eaten with game.

Crab Apple (Malus sylvestris): Jelly and wine, mixed with apples in a tart.

Red Currant (Ribes sylvestris)

Black Currant (Ribes nigrum)

Gooseberry (Ribes urva-crispa)

Cowberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea): Berries eaten, also makes jelly.

Bilberry, Whortleberry (Vaccinium mytillus): Berries used in tarts, jelly, jam or raw. In the Hebrides the leaves are dried and used as tea.

Cranberry (Oxycoccus palustris)

Crowberry (Empetrum nigrum)

Broom (Sarathamnus scoparius): Wine was made from the flowers. The twigs, tied into bundles and chopped neatly at the end, were used, as its name suggests, for sweeping the hearth or the bread oven. Birch besom was used for the cobbled yard. All parts extensively used medicinally.

Roses (Rosaceae): Hips made into a drink or jam.

Nuts

Sweet Almond (Amygdalus communis var. dulcis) and Bitter Almond (var. amara): Brought to Britain by the Romans, became wild, cultivated after 1562, admired then chiefly for its blossom. The nuts are free of starch. In the Middle Ages almonds were an important article of commerce in Central Europe, for consumption in cookery was enormous. Jeanne d’Evreux, Queen of France, listed in an inventory 20 lb sugar and 500 lb almonds. Nuts give oil; when nuts are ground and mixed with water they make a most delicious milk. A butter can be made from ground almonds (the milk can be churned like cow’s milk), sugar and rose water.

Beechnut (Fagus sylvatica): The nuts of beech called mast have always been used for food to feed animals and humans; pigs let loose in the woods will consume all the mast that has fallen and grow fat on it. The mast will yield oil (similar to hazel in flavour) used for cooking and burning.

Hazel (Corylus avellana): These nuts have been eaten from the earliest times. Much admired in the ancient world.

Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa): Romans introduced it to England. The nuts were thrown onto a fire and scorched in the embers, as they are still eaten; they can also be ground into flour and used in cooking, made into soups, fritters and stuffings, or preserved in sugar or syrup as marron glacé.

Walnut (Juglans regia): There is some evidence that walnuts existed before the Romans, but their enthusiasm for them must have made the tree popular. The nuts produce an oil used for cooking and for salads. The shells were used for a black hair dye.

Fungi

These were a movable feast, for they arise out of the earth always in new and unexpected places. The fact that a few are poisonous and/or hallucinatory would have been learnt and remembered. They were treated with awe. Here are a few which are the most common: parasol (Lepiota procera), milk mushroom (Lactarius deliciosus), chanterelle (Catharellus cibarius), common mushroom (Agaricus campestris), horse mushroom (Agaricus arvensis), edible bolet (Boletus edulis), giant puff ball (Lycoperdon bovista).

Seaweeds

Laver (Porphyra lacinata), lettuce ulva (Ulva lactuca), carrageheen moss (Chrondus crispus) also known as Irish Moss and Iceland Moss; when boiled it forms a jelly. Dulse (Rhodyrnenia palmata) boiled and eaten with butter; there are two other dulse (Dilsea edulis) and the pepper dulse (Lawrencia pinnatifida); this last is found all around the coast of Britain and is hot to the taste, hence makes an excellent pickle. Its leaves are not unlike those of the oak tree enlarged. Bladderwrack (Fucis vesiculosis): Used as manure all round the coast. Gives 20-40 lb potash to the ton. Also burnt to produce smoke for flavouring and drying bacon and fish. Cattle are fed with it.