The Reporter's Kitchen

by Jane Kramer

  Foraging places are like houses. Some speak to you, others you ignore. I wasn’t surprised that the land around that tumbledown house spoke to Paterson. He jumped out of the car, peered over a thicket of roadside bush and sloe trees, and disappeared down a steep, very wet slope before I had even unbuckled my seat belt—after which he emerged, upright and waving, in an overgrown copse enclosed by a circle of trees. Cleared, the copse would have provided a shady garden for a farmer’s family. To a forager, it was perfect: a natural rain trap, sheltered against the harsh sun, and virtually hidden from the road. Everywhere we turned, there were plants to gather. Even the wild asparagus, which usually hides from the sun in a profusion of other plants’ leaves and stalks, was so plentiful that you couldn’t miss it. We filled a shopping bag.

  Wild asparagus has a tart, ravishing taste—what foragers call a wilderness taste—and a season so short as to be practically nonexistent. It’s as different from farmed asparagus as a morel is from the boxed mushrooms at your corner store. I was ready to head back and start planning my risotto, but Paterson had spotted a patch of leafy scrub and pulled me toward it. He called it crespina. I had never heard of crespina, nor, after months of searching, have I found it in any Italian dictionary. It’s the local word for spiny sow thistle—a peppery wild vegetable whose leaves taste a little like spinach and a lot like sorrel and, as I soon discovered, come with a spiky center rib sharp enough to etch a fine line down the palm of your hand if you’ve never handled them before. (I regard the small scar that I got that day as a forager’s mark of initiation.) We added a respectable bunch of leaves to the shopping bag, and carried the overflow up to the car in our arms. An hour later, we were separating and trimming the morning’s spoils in the tiny restaurant kitchen where, six days a week, Paterson cooks alone for fifty people (“Where would I put a sous-chef?” he asked, stepping on my foot) and comparing recipes for wild-asparagus risotto. Here is his “most beautiful way” to make it: Snap off the fibrous ends of the asparagus spears and crush them with the blade of a knife. Simmer them in water or a mild stock until the stock takes flavor. Strain the stock. Pour a cupful of white wine into rice that’s been turned for a minute or two in hot olive oil and some minced onion. As soon as the wine boils down, start ladling in the stock. Keep ladling and stirring until the rice is practically al dente and the last ladle of stock is in the pan. Now fold in the asparagus heads. In no time, all you will need to do is grate the Parmesan and serve.

  I made Paterson’s risotto for dinner that night, along with a roast chicken and the crespina leaves, sautéed for a minute, like baby spinach, in olive oil and a sprinkling of red pepper flakes; the spines wilted into a tasty crunch. The next night, I chopped my fronds of wild fennel and used them to stuff a pork roast. When I called Paterson to say how good everything was, he told me, “Free food! There’s nothing like it. It always tastes better.”

  JULY

  I went to Oxford to give a talk and got to forage in Pinsley Wood, an ancient forest near a village called Church Hanborough. You can find the original wood in the Domesday Book—the “unalterable” tax survey of English and Welsh landholdings compiled for William the Conqueror in 1086—and indeed, the only altered thing about that venerable preserve is that now it’s a lot smaller and everyone can enjoy it. In spring, when the ground is covered with bluebells, foragers complain about having to contend with lovers, nestled in sheets of sweet-smelling flowers, watching the clouds go by. By July, the bluebells are gone and there are no distractions.

  My friends Paul Levy and Elisabeth Luard—writers, foragers, and distinguished foodies (a word that, for better or for worse, Levy is said to have coined)—walked me through Pinsley Wood, armed with bags and baskets. Our plan was to make a big lunch with everything edible we found. Levy, a polymath whose books range from a biography of G. E. Moore during his Cambridge Apostle years to a whirlwind sampler of culinary erudition called Out to Lunch, has been the food and wine editor of The Observer, an arts correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, and for the past eight years, the co-chair of the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery. Luard, who began foraging as a botanical illustrator and traveler and whose many cookbooks include the estimable European Peasant Cookery—a virtual travelogue of foraged and homegrown food—is the symposium’s executive director.

  My husband and I were staying with Levy and his wife (and self-described “arts wallah”), Penelope Marcus, at their Oxfordshire farmhouse, a rambling place, almost as old as Pinsley Wood, with a kitchen garden so vast and various in its offerings that I was tempted to ditch my mud boots, which had turned out to be plastic-coated cardboard (six euros do not a Welly make), and do my foraging there, in flip-flops, with a pair of gardening shears and a glass of iced tea waiting on the kitchen table. In fact, we began our foraging at the Levys’ barn wall, in a small overgrown patch of wild plants where fresh stinging nettles were sprouting like weeds (which is what they are) among the blackberry brambles and the dandelion greens and the malva, a purple flower often used in melokhia, the delectable Egyptian soup that I once ate in London but alas have never been able to replicate. We were going to use the nettles for an English broad-bean-and-vegetable soup that afternoon.

  We drove to the wood in Luard’s old Mazda—past a village allotment with wild oats growing outside the fence and, inside, what looked to be a bumper crop of opium poppies—and listened to Luard and Levy talk about forest plants. Don’t bother with “dead nettles”—stingless flowering perennials that had no relation to our nettles and, to Luard’s mind, were not worth eating. Don’t overdo the elderberry unless you need a laxative. Beware of plants with pretty berries or pretty names, and especially of plants with both—which in the Hanboroughs means to remember that the flowering plant called lords-and-ladies, with its juicy scarlet berries and sultry folded hood, was more accurately known to generations of poisoners as the deadly Arum “kill your neighbor.” “A stinky plant,” Levy said. I wrote it all down.

  Levy considers himself a “basic local forager,” which is to say that he doesn’t drive three or four hours to the sea for his samphire and sea aster; he buys them at Waitrose. He loves wild garlic, and knows that sheets of bluebells in Pinsley Wood mean that wild garlic is growing near them. He “scrabbles” for the food he likes at home. “I can identify Jack-by-the-hedge for salad,” he told me. “And I can do sloes, brambles, elderberries. Anyone who lives in the countryside here can. Elisabeth is the more advanced forager, but I do know a little about truffles and wild mushrooms. Three of us once identified more than twenty mushroom species near here in Blenheim Park, and I’m quite good at chanterelles and porcini.” Levy thinks of Pinsley Wood as his neighborhood mushroom habitat. It has an old canopy of oak and ash, but it also has birch trees (chanterelles grow in their shade), and most of the interior is beech (porcini and truffles). Summer truffles are pretty much what you find in England. They are black outside and pale grayish brown inside, and you have to dig twice as many as you think you’ll need to match anything like the deep flavor of France’s black winter truffles in a sauce périgueux.

  Levy and my husband, who had been planning to spend a quiet day at the Ashmolean Museum but was shamed out of it, immediately started following a network of burrowed tunnels—a “sett”—that led them into the wood near clusters of beech trees with small circular swells of dark moist earth beneath them. Swells like those are a sign of truffles, pushing up the ground. Setts mean that badgers probably got to the truffles first. A good truffle dog, like a hungry badger, can sniff its way to a truffle by following the scent of the spores left in its own feces from as long as a year before. The difference between a truffle dog and a badger—or for that matter, the boar that trample my sage and rosemary bushes in their rush to my pond to root and drink—is that your dog doesn’t go truffling without you, and when it digs a truffle, as many Italian truffle dogs are trained to do, it mouths it gently and gives it to you intact. Or relatively intact. A few weeks later, when Paterson and I went t
ruffling with an obliging local carabiniere named Bruno Craba and his two truffle terrier mutts, one of the dogs surrendered so helplessly to the intoxicating smell of semen that the tubers emit—known to foodies as the truffle umami—that she swallowed half a truffle the size of a tennis ball before presenting the rest of it to her master.

  Being without benefit of a truffle dog, let alone a small spade or even a soup spoon for loosening the soil, Luard and I abandoned the men, who by then were up to their wrists in dirt, hoping to find a truffle that the badgers had missed. They didn’t. With lunch on our minds, we went in search of more accessible food. “Pea plants—plants of the Leguminosae family—are mostly what you get here,” Luard told me. You have to look for seed-bearing pods and single flowers with four “free” petals (which The New Oxford Book of Food Plants describes as “a large upper standard, 2 lateral wings, and a boat-shaped keel”). I left the identifying to her. Luard, who has foraged in twenty countries, has been called a walking encyclopedia of wild food. She was.

  While we gathered pea plants, I learned that British countrywomen thicken their jellies with rose hips, crabapples, and the red fruit clusters of rowan bushes, which people in Wales, where Luard lives, plant by their doors to keep witches away. (There’s a recipe for “hedgerow jelly” in her new book, A Cook’s Year in a Welsh Farmhouse.) Passing what looked to be the remains of a wild ground orchid, I was instructed in the virtues of “saloop,” a drink made from the powder of crushed orchid roots which for centuries was the pick-me-up of London’s chimney sweeps—“the Ovaltine and Horlicks of its time, with more protein than a fillet de boeuf,” Luard said. (You can read about saloop in Charles Lamb, who hated it.) We walked past silverweed plants (“edible but not tasty”) and meadowsweet (“the underscent of vanilla in the flowers makes a nice tea”) and the leaf shoots of young wild carrots (“skinny as can be means good in soup”) and teasel (“not for eating; for combing wool”) and butterwort, which, like fig-tree sap in Italy, is a vegetable rennet, “good for making cheese.” Along the way, I discovered that farm children in southern Spain, where Luard lived with her family in the seventies, ate wild-fennel fronds and “sucked on the lemony stalks” of wood sorrel on their way to school, by way of a second breakfast. “Children are a huge source of information about wild food,” she told me. “In Spain, I would ask the village women to tell me what they foraged and how they cooked it, and they wouldn’t answer—they were embarrassed by foraging, like your Italian neighbors—but their children knew. My children would walk to school with them, eating the leaves and berries that their friends plucked from the roadside verges. They learned from their friends, and I learned from them. I’ve lived in a lot of places, and I’ve discovered that a basic knowledge of food runs all the way through Europe. The people I lived with cooked, of necessity, what they grew, and the wild food they added—the changing taste of leaves and nuts, for instance—was what gave interest to those few things. It taught me that when you grow enough to eat, you begin to make it taste good. That’s not a frippery, it’s a need.”

  Luard, as senior forager, was in charge of lunch. Levy was in charge of fetching claret from the cellar and coaxing heat from an unpredictable Aga. Marcus was in charge of setting the garden table, while my husband, who had volunteered for the washing up, wandered around, keeping up the conversation. And I was stationed at the sink, sorting and cleaning a good deal of Pinsley Wood. It was an unfortunate assignment, since I tend to daydream at kitchen sinks, and the better the dream, the slower my pace. Sorting our forage took me half an hour. Cleaning it took twice as long, given the number of bugs clinging to every leaf and flower, not to mention Luard’s instructions, among them separating the yarrow leaves we’d collected from any lingering trace of petals, and scraping the hairy calyxes from the bottom of borage flowers. We sat down to lunch at four-thirty. The soup was a vegetarian feast of flageolets with (among other good, wild things) nettles, yarrow leaves, and dandelions, and the salad a spicy mix of wild sorrel, dandelions, onion flowers, and borage flowers. But my favorite dish was the scrambled eggs that Luard made with an unseemly amount of farm butter and double cream and a mountain of fresh sorrel. The sorrel for that came from the Levys’ kitchen garden, a few feet from the back door.

  AUGUST

  I wasn’t really ready for René Redzepi. I had tried to prepare. I downloaded the stories that appeared last spring, when a jury of chefs and food writers, convened by the British magazine Restaurant, named Noma the world’s best restaurant for the second year. I studied the photographs in Redzepi’s cookbook, memorized the names in his glossary of plants and seaweeds, and even tried to improvise on some of his simpler recipes with my local produce—impossible in a part of Italy where the collective culinary imagination is so literally “local” that broccoli is considered a foreign food and oregano is dismissed as “something the Tuscans eat.” But I flew to Denmark anyway, planning to make a trial foraging run in western Zealand with my Danish friend (and fellow journalist) Merete Baird, who spends her summers in a farmhouse overlooking Nexelo Bay—a trove of wilderness food—and likes to eat at Lammefjordens Spisehus, a restaurant run by one of Redzepi’s disciples. My foraging trial ended before it began, in a freezing downpour, and as for the restaurant, the storm had left me so hungry that at dinner that night, I passed up the young chef’s lovely deconstructed tomato-and-wild-herb soup and his leafy Noma-inspired offerings and ordered two fat Danish sausages and a bowl of warm potato salad.

  I met Redzepi at Noma early the following afternoon. He arrived on an old bike, chained it outside the restaurant—a converted warehouse on a quay where trading ships once unloaded fish and skins from Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands—and tried to ignore the tourists who were milling about, their cameras ready, hoping for a shot of arguably the most famous Dane since Hamlet. In fact, most of them barely glanced at the small young man with floppy brown hair, in jeans, battered sneakers, and an untucked wrinkled shirt, locking up his bike. Redzepi is thirty-three, with a wife and two small children, but he can look like a student who slept in his clothes and is now running late for an exam. The most flamboyant thing about him may be the short beard he frequently grows—and just as frequently sheds. It is hard to imagine him in a white toque or a bloody apron or, à la Mario Batali, in baggy Bermudas and orange crocs. When I left for my hotel that day, one of the tourists stopped me: “That kid you were with earlier? His bike’s still here.”

  Redzepi opened Noma in 2003, at the age of twenty-five, backed by the gastronomical entrepreneur of a successful catering service and bakery chain (whose bread he doesn’t serve) and a “new Danish” furniture designer (whose advice he routinely rejects). He was nine years out of culinary school, during which time he had apprenticed at one of Copenhagen’s best restaurants, endured a long stage in the unhappy kitchen of a testy three-star Montpelier chef, and made molecular magic in Catalonia with Ferran Adrià. “I ate a meal at elBulli,” as he tells the story, “and as soon as I finished I went up to Adrià and asked for a job. He said, ‘Write me a letter.’ So I did. A few weeks later, I found a job offer, complete with contract, in the mail.” He stayed at elBulli for a season, and in the course of it, landed his next job—at Thomas Keller’s French Laundry in Napa Valley, where he was much taken with the emphasis on local food. He was back in Copenhagen, cooking “Scandinavian French” at the restaurant Kong Hans Kælder, when the call came asking if he’d like a restaurant of his own.

  “We had the idea: let’s use local products here,” he told me the next morning. We were at a diner, making a caffeine stop on the way to a beach at Dragør—a town on the Øresund strait, about twenty minutes from the outskirts of Copenhagen—where he likes to forage. “But I was very unhappy at first. Why? Because we were taking recipes from other cultures, serving essentially the same ‘Scandinavian French’ food, and just because you’re using local produce to make that food doesn’t mean you’re making a food of your own culture. I started asking myself, ‘What i
s a region? What is the sum of the people we are, the culture we are? What does it taste like? What does it look like on a plate? It was a very complex thing for us—the idea of finding a new flavor that was ‘ours.’”

  Five years later, having raised the money for a research foundation called the Nordic Food Lab, he hired an American chef named Lars Williams—who arrived with a degree in English literature, a passion for food chemistry, and fifteen lines of the first book of Paradise Lost tattooed on his right arm—to preside over a test kitchen on a houseboat across the quay from Noma and begin to “release the umami of Nordic cuisine.” At the moment, they were looking for some in a liquid concentrate of dried peas, which I had sampled on the houseboat the day before. (It was quite good, with the rich bite of a soy concentrate and, at the same time, a kind of pea-plant sweetness.) And they planned to look for more in a brew of buckwheat and fatty fish, starting with herring or mackerel. They were also “looking into” Nordic insects, Redzepi said. (On a trip to Australia last year, he had eaten white larvae that he swore tasted “exactly like fresh almonds.”) “The question for us is how to keep that free-sprouting spirit here,” he told me. “In gastronomical terms, we’re not at the finish line, but we know what it could be.”