Forage & Feast
Foraging is an activity that goes back to our hunter-gatherer days when searching the forest floor was integral to our survival toolkit. As populations grew and societies turned towards modern agricultural methods, our interactions with wild landscapes became less frequent and the knowledge of how to safely forage for wild ingredients, once passed down through the generations, was largely lost. Over the past two decades, as people have sought to form more meaningful connections with nature, foraging has seen a remarkable resurgence and the pastime’s popularity is rising once again. Two foraging professionals at the heart of the revival in Northumberland are Linus Morton and Louise Hepworth. Through foraging experiences and wild cooking courses, their business - Northern Wilds - invites people to discover their more sustainable way of life. At the beginning of the mushroom season, we embarked on one of Northern Wild’s highly revered Forage & Feast experiences.
In the outer reaches of Kielder Forest, we watch intently as Linus Morton scans the mossy forest floor. Before long he finds a fungi he deems in his own words to be ‘edible excellent’ – removing the blade attached to his belt, he wields it deftly, slicing the stem of his selected shroom, before brushing away the soil and placing it delicately in his wicker basket. We are an hour into a Northern Wilds Forage & Feast experience and the vast Kielder Forest is both our playground and pantry.
We are surprised to learn that the United Kingdom is typically viewed as a mushroom-fearing nation. To Brits, fungi are the stuff of fairy tales, associated with witchcraft and psychedelics. “These are some of the best-known yet least-understood foraged foods,” Linus says. There are over fifteen thousand species of fungi in the UK alone, of which only a tiny fraction are of any culinary use. Delectable varieties, such as chanterelles and wood blewits thrive in our woodlands, but despite this, the British tend to have a mycophobic mindset. Neither plant nor animal, fungi exists in a Kingdom of their own. The mushrooms and toadstools we see above the surface are in fact just a small part of the fungus itself. Hidden underground, fungi exist as intricate networks of threads, known as mycelia. These networks play a vital role in the decay process, recycling nutrients, sharing them with other plants and feeding wildlife and foragers like us.
Venturing deeper into the forest, we spread out in a jumbled line like a disorganised forensic team to scour the undergrowth. It is not long before an excited commotion beneath a beech tree has Linus running over to confirm that we are in the presence of fungal royalty. With its cartoonish bulbous stem, this baby porcini is instantly recognisable as the cover star of cookery books worldwide. It is one of the boletes, a relatively safe family for novice foragers that contains an abundance of prime edibles. Once you start looking for mushrooms, you see them everywhere. Minutes later, one of the group discovers a cluster of baby chanterelles, another gourmet find. Standing out like buttercups against the mossy path, they smell like apricots, yet their key family identifier is the wrinkly, vein-like gills. “You’d pay a fortune for these in a restaurant!” Linus grins.
Not every mushroom we find is edible. Linus divides them into four groups – poisonous, inedible, edible good and edible excellent. We discover that the ones that you can eat often have toxic look-alikes. You should be certain of identification before eating any mushroom, Linus warns us. “It can be tricky to distinguish sometimes, but if I am not sure, I just don’t eat it. It is only a meal at the end of the day!”. We soon learn the obvious ones to avoid, including the umbrella-like death cap, the destroying angel and the aptly named, funeral bells. Thankfully we do not meet any of Kielder’s pantomime villains, only an enormous false chanterelle which Linus says if consumed would lead to hallucinations, nausea and violent diarrhoea, so he has heard.
Retracing our steps, Linus continues to point out other edible foods of the forest, pausing to make sure we all get a chance to savour the flavours. We taste peppery chickweed and vetch, or poor man's peas as it is known amongst foragers. A plant we cannot get enough of is wood sorrel; bizarrely the distinctive trefoil leaves share a similar flavour to that of Haribo Tangfastics. Striding ahead Linus continues to fill his basket with ingredients. In go nettle seeds, a superfood which he toasts for bread-making. Bright red rowan berries for jams and jellies, and angelica, the roots of which he uses to infuse his homemade bitters.
With our baskets full, our stomachs empty and our brains trying to retain all we had learned, we make our way to a remote riverside picnic spot where Louise joins us to inspect our bounty and presents us with a pre-prepared fungi feast. Short of a dining table, Linus descends the river bank, soon returning with two stones which he fashions into a makeshift serving platform. One by one we take turns filling our plates with wonderful wild cuisine. As we stand munching wild mushroompâté on homebaked nettle bread, the trickling falls of Hindhope Linn echoing around the ravine, it is clear a deep appreciation for our surroundings has settled among the group. “You will never look at a forest in the same way!” Louise laughs. We thank them both for an insightful and palatable experience in equal measure. Linus responds, “It has been a pleasure, at the end of the day I have gone out on a good walk and will be returning home with all the ingredients for a tasty meal!”
Photography by Zoe Warde-Aldam
