It was the documentary about the supermarket chickens with burnt elbows that did it for me. I won’t go into detail because you may well be trying to eat your organic muesli, but it was grim. We are what we eat, and who wants to be made from ammoniated chicken elbows? So now we’ve jumped onto the local-butcher- supporting, organic-vegetable- box-buying bandwagon. We now show off about our excessively fair-trade marmalade, our hand-reared, angora-wrapped duck eggs and our cheese biscuits made by Prince Charles himself.
It’s not just us. You can hardly strike up a conversation these days without a “lovely little farmers’ market” this and a “supporting an entire Guatemalan village” that. Once you’re on the bandwagon, it’s clear the bandwagon can run out of control pretty quickly.
Which might explain why I am standing in the sludgy shallows of the River Severn, eating bits of vegetation I find swirling around my wellies. I am foraging for my supper, which is either incredibly sophisticated and will trump any other food show-off for some time to come, or is incredibly unsophisticated and won’t. I suspect it’s both.
Ever since Matt Tebbutt (left), 32-year-old super-chef, escaped the hellish kitchens of Soho to set up his own gourmet restaurant in the rural depths of South Wales, he has used locally foraged ingredients to spice up his menus.
The Foxhunter in Nantyderry, a pretty twist and turn up the hill from the River Usk, was voted the AA Restaurant of the Year for Wales in 2004 after Matt and his wife, Lisa, completely refurbished an old stationmaster’s house.
Now, he’s teamed up with his forager-in-chief, Raoul Van Den Broucke, to offer a food tour with a difference. You go out with them, find whatever is in season in the woolly wilds of Monmouthshire, bring your harvest back to his kitchen and stand by while he cooks up something delicious. It’s Ready Steady Cook without shops.
The vegetation I’m eating straight out of the Severn is samphire, which is about as trendy as rocket was in the Nineties. You’ll pay £15 a kilo for it in your posh farmers’ market, but here it’s free, fresh and delicious. If a bit salty. We’ve already found blackberries, bay leaves, sea spinach and elderberries. Matt is especially pleased with the elderberries because he’s got some pigeon back in the kitchen. His philosophy is that it’s good to serve meat with whatever the meat would have eaten when the meat was alive. So a rabbit might be nice with some peas, because rabbits like nothing better than peas (except of course carrots, but we’ll allow a little artistic licence). Salmon is good with its favourite snack, crayfish, seabass is good with samphire, and pigeons, as we all know, like nothing better than elderberries. You follow?
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With one basket full of estuarine treats, we relocate north into the forests of the Usk Valley in search of mushrooms. Raoul, a Belgian from Zimbabwe, then South Africa, then Portugal, with a Welsh then Scottish wife, carries the standard equipment of any veteran forager: a wicker basket (plastic bags ruin the delicate fungi), a protective hat (because he’s always looking down rather than straight ahead) and a stick (for the spider webs). He also has a beard, which lends an air of authenticity. Outside a forest, a man with a beard is deeply suspicious. Inside, it gives him the air of a forest sprite. In this case, a forest sprite with a Belgian accent and, hopefully, an excellent knowledge of mushrooms.
Matt tells us an unsettling story about an Italian chef he knows who was orphaned when his parents — both professional foragers — dropped dead at the dinner table after picking the wrong kind of mushroom. Then Raoul explains that there are four deadly fungi in Britain and, despite their obvious don’t-eat-me names (panther cap, destroying angel et al), they look very like the harmless ones. Who would have thought foraging was an adrenaline sport?
One hundred yards in, Raoul is muttering about ash trees being no good. We find puffballs: inedible but great if we wanted to dye anything blue. Then we find a huge tree fungus that cavemen used as kindling. Also, unsurprisingly, inedible. This becomes the theme of the morning. Each time we find another specimen, Raoul picks it, we gather round closely, he examines it, we gather closer, he sniffs it, we sniff it, my five-month-old son tries to grab it, then Raoul says, “No, very poisonous” and we all recoil, except my five-month-old son who still tries to grab it.
After an hour wandering the beautiful forests with our sprite, our wicker basket is not exactly brimming and I’m a little disappointed. My wife isn’t: “That’s the whole point of foraging,” she says, all knowing, somewhat preachy, borderline patronising. “The forest isn’t a supermarket. You find what you can and make do.” This is real food-origin super-snobbery and I like it. Later, I’ll cudgel people at dinner parties with this.
Back at the Foxhunter, Matt is in his whites surveying a smorgasbord of foraged treats. He has wimberries, elderberries, blackberries, hazelnuts, a few mushrooms, herbs, sea spinach and samphire. He also has the benefit of eight years working with the likes of Marco Pierre White and Alastair Little.
Half an hour of chef’s alchemy and Ramsay-esque profanity later, and we’re eating roast pigeon, samphire and elderberry jus, and wild mushroom on garlic toast, followed by hazelnut shortbread with wild fruits. Who’d have thought scratching around in South Wales could have produced such a feast? Okay, so the premier cru we had with it might be cheating, but there’s no point in being pedantic, is there? One thing’s for sure, my pigeon didn’t have burnt elbows. Just a bit of shot: worse for the teeth, better for the mind.
Need to know
The foraging trip and wild-food lunch costs from £100 for the first couple and £30 for each additional person. Or you can let someone else do the foraging and just go for dinner. Call 01873 881101 or visit www.thefoxhunter.com.
They have also just converted one of the stationworkers’ cottages into a boutique hidey-hole. It costs £125, B&B, sleeps three (or a family of four) and is within zigzag distance of the restaurant.
