frame 50 March 2024
Insalata della Strada
by Flora Blissett
Flora Blissett is a freelance writer with no particular base. From working in London art galleries and writing for artists, she packed walking boots and a laptop to the Western Isles to see where unacknowledged stories of people and their connection to place take her.
Flora has a BA in English Language and Literature from Magdalen College, Oxford. She received the 2020 University of Oxford HAPP Scholarship, funding her MSc History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at St Cross College there. In a final flurry of panic about what to do, she studied the History of Art Graduate Diploma at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her writing has been published independently and by art galleries in London and New York.
‘Do NOT eat the mushrooms!!’ ‘Have 999 keyed in if the girls eat the foraged omelette!!!!’ ‘Please text to let us know you’re alive after eating the mushrooms!!’
My mum has no faith in my foraging. Anxious texts and replies to my Instagram stories flood my phone screen as I document the culinary exploits of my day off with two friends. Working a season at a café on the Isle of Skye, we take this springlike autumn day off for a long walk to and from Macleod’s Maidens. It has become habit on these weekend excursions to bring a Tupperware or little zippy-bag with us. Just in case – the likely case – we see some things to forage. Gorse flowers (smelt as soon as seen in equal power, their bright yellow spilling into the very air as coconut and almond), plantain (its long, narrow leaves swelling towards their end. A common site on school playing fields, often considered a weed but in fact brews a delightfully antibiotic, albeit bitter, tea), wood sorrel (clover’s pinewood-shade-coveting doppelgänger), lady’s mantel (brew a tea with this to alleviate menstrual cramps). And, as my mum blanket-terms them, ‘mushrooms’.
But, as I’m learning, you ought not think of ‘mushrooms’ any more than you think of ‘trees’ or ‘people’. Rather, see them as individuals.
A lack of specificity breeds distrust and panic. ‘Relax, mum! I know these “mushrooms” are Puffballs!’ And therefore, I know that they are safe. That when firm and white they are edible; when softening under a thin crust, dark brown and silver, they are not worth eating – though thousands of spores powerfully erupt in a musty green sneeze if prodded with a careful toe or weather-rounded stick.
The more I’m walking, looking, and – most importantly – listening to others, the more ‘mushroom’ is exposed as a generic term, better modified with specific, prefixing nouns: magic mushroom, chanterelle mushroom, puffball mushroom, waxcap mushroom. The waxcap itself unfurls in a web of further specificities: Splendid waxcap, Meadow waxcap, Crimson waxcap, spilling red and orange across their gills like water seeped through ink.
These are just a handful of names I’ve come to learn, signifying organisms I’m seeing with acuteness rather than with the shadowed vision of generalisation. I’m growing in confidence to feel familiarity.
For instance, the puffball. I might bang on about this fungus here, dear reader, but that is because I am ecstatic at having learnt it. I’m back home from Skye, it's a winter’s walk in Wiltshire. My middle brother and I tack the chalk-hillsides like quiet sail boats, from neolithic site to neolithic site under a pearl-blue sky. In one expansive, sheep-clipped field, I stop abruptly. Something in the grass appears to my eyes and clicks something in my brain. ‘Oh!’ I cry. Crouching and pointing to an ugly lump, no bigger than a decaying crab apple and just the same colour, but I recognise it as something with a name, and a descriptive name at that. That silvery-brown thin crust. Could it be? ‘I bet! I think! If we poke it gently…’. I do. ‘There!’ The otherwise unseen dark moss-green cloud bursts from its little crater. My brother, from whom I’m always learning so much, has just learnt something from me. We walk on. I glow sheepishly with pride.
I comfort myself (and my ego) with the idea that my mum doesn’t lack faith in me but in the mushrooms. They are, to her, ‘strange’. Fair enough. We’ve all heard horror stories: anything other than the supermarket’s clingfilmed button mushroom is, surely, a toxic Death Cap. Without a name, no recognition is possible. With no recognition, there can be no familiarity, fondness, or engagement.
Learning a name changes everything. It enables you distinguish individual organisms from the tangle of grasses and patchwork of woodlands and fields. Know the word, and you can get to know the world. Foraging is as much about collecting vocabulary as verdure.
And the word must come from our attention to the thing itself. Chanterelle – from the ancient Greek kantharos, denoting a kind of drinking container. Apt, for a fungus which pouts upward like blown glass. Magic mushroom, though colloquial, is to the point. As is puffball (we could do worse than to adopt the simplicity of a toddler naming things of the world). Plantain and lady’s mantle are named for their uncanny similarities to other, familiar, things: plantain’s broad, widening leaf recalls the Latin planta, or sole of the foot. Lady’s mantle resembles just that: its tough lily-pad leaves and vibrant green flowers suggest a lady’s cape. A favourite is dandelion: the butchered Anglicisation of the French dent de lion, ‘tooth of the lion’, a name celebrating the jagged flash of the leaves around its brilliant yellow muzzle.
Lyricism and attention go hand in hand: poetry in language enables vibrancy in vision (and vice versa). Look at the thing with care to find its due name. Such taxonomies change our experience of the world, enlarging the scope of what we can notice.
With this recourse to research, I’m discovering that foraging is less about digging into the earth and finding things for ourselves, and more about sharing: words, places, walks, stories. It is less a physical undertaking and more an intellectual gathering - foraging for the knowledge of foraging (this also avoids the title of this article being, as my eldest brother quipped: 95 Ways to Poison Yourself in the Countryside).
I take this idea very literally and look up the etymology of ‘to forage’. From Proto-Indo-European, it means ‘to protect, to feed’. I didn’t expect that. Not ‘gather, hide, consume’, but cherish, nurture. We must forage as foraging demands of us. Protect knowledge of the organisms equals protecting them in living form: protecting the wor(l)d. This ensures our verbal and bodily ‘feeding’ on language and leafage. We must also ‘feed’ others with the words: share, sow – put out into the world as you take into your own basket.
And where that ‘world’ is might surprise you.
It’s a Sunday at the Skye café – the day the chef puts on a special. The front of house staff and I stand in the kitchen for the debrief: ‘whipped smoked mackerel on toast, soft boiled egg, apple, candied beetroot and foraged sorrel.’ We nod. My mouth waters, my ears prick up at the mention of ‘foraged sorrel’. Where could she have sourced this: in the wee hours of the morning, braving frost and woodland spookiness? I’m abruptly called from these romantic images as the debrief ends and the chef chirpily declares, ‘Well! Now I’m just going to pick the sorrel from the carpark’. Forget my romantic, misty-morning visions. I’m thrilled. The carpark! Foraging just 20 metres from the kitchen on the grassy banks of… the carpark. I have the special for lunch (the leftover demo we were shown that morning). The small, punchy sorrel leaves draw out the tang of the apple and sweeten the smokiness of the mackerel. What unknown flavour it has! Yet what closeness it came from!
One ultimate foraging lesson I’m learning on Skye is that this location is completely irrelevant. I’d moved here with great excitement for ‘life on Skye, foraging on Skye, wild food… on Skye!’ But I’ve learnt here that I don’t need to be here. Foraging is about looking closely, not into distant landscapes. There’s a wilderness in your driveway. There’s sorrel in the carpark, blackberries by the bins.
Back in the 1980s, my parents lived in Italy child- and fancy-free. The very same woman who had bombarded my iPhone screen with hysterical texts warning of self-poisoning had once popped into an Umbrian shop, where she saw a lady passing the grocer a large carrier bag of rocket leaves. ‘Ohh, may I buy some off you?’, mum ventured. The lady grinned: ‘you can have some. It’s insalata della strada’. Roadside salad.
We don’t have to travel miles to some remote place, some ‘wilderness’, to forage. We don’t, in fact, have to go anywhere. We must simply pay more attention to the place we are in.
List of illustrations
Flora Blissett near Glenbrittle beach, Skye.
A young puffball, white, firm, and in this form edible.
Gorse flowers and wood sorrel gathered in an empty margarine pot when walking along the coast to Macleod’s Maidens.
Scarlet Waxcap, met when walking the Quiraing.