Edible Seashore: River Cottage Handbook No.5
Ray Mears once said that in the event of an apocalyptic catastrophe that left survivors to fend for themselves, he’d head straight for the coast because that’s where you’ll find the most wild food with the least effort. Seaweeds, edible molluscs, crustaceans, edible coastal plants, and, of course, fish are all easily accessed with just a little know-how.
One should always be prepared for an apocalypse. And, as we're thoroughly coastal for another month, I ordered a copy of John Wright's Edible Seashore.
We’re not total novices at this. We’ve harvested samphire before now, netted brown shrimp, and salted those tell-tale slots in the sand to haul out curious razors clams. But there’s more, much more. Gutweed, for example. And squat lobsters.
The Edible Seashore has everything you could want from such a book, plus some: where to forage, what to look for, how to harvest it, how to avoid inadvertantly ingesting raw sewage, regulations concerning foraging, photographs that actually help you identify stuff, recipes that require very little skill but look interesting and occasionally delicious.
By now, you might be thinking “okaaaay ... why on earth is this seaweed-eating idiot reviewing this on Litopia?”
Well, because it’s extraordinarily well-written and very funny. It's a perfect example of how a handbook can be informative and hugely entertaining at the same time.
Take yer limpets, for example. Easy to find, clinging like, well, limpets to rocks. So slow moving that a tree could catch them. Taste: according to Wright: "pencil rubbers dipped in fish paste”.
Then there's winkles, and Wright’s Auntie Margaret. She'd painstakingly winkle winkles out of their shells, line them up on a slice of bread, spatter them with vinegar and enjoy a winkle sandwich. It takes a lot of winkles to make a winkle sandwich. It takes courage, determination, and a lot of spare time. And that’s not the end of Auntie Margaret's winkley-pokery, either. Winkles, apparently, have little trapdoors about their persons. The trapdoors are inedible but Auntie Margaret and her friends devised a use for them. They'd stick them on to their faces to create fashionable beauty spots.
And did you know that after sex, a male winkle's winkle drops off?
Wham, bam, damn.
Reviewed by Crowe
- Array
