The topic of wild food is a huge one, and identification plays a vital role in all wild food foraging. As well as the wild food recipes, which are available below, this site also has a comprehensive listing of wild food sources as well as separate listings for seaweed (sea vegetables) and mushrooms (including fungi). These can be found using the links below:
Wild Food Guide (over 180 wild foods described, with example recipes)
Guide to Edible Mushrooms and Fungi (a brief identification guide, with example recipes)
Guide to Edible Seaweed (Sea Vegetables) (a brief identification guide, with example recipes)

Wild Food

In the broadest sense, a wild food is anything edible that can be sourced from the wild. This will include native plants, introduced plants and plants that have escaped from gardens into the wild, or even gardens that have become 'feral' (gone back into the wild). When one factors in sea plants along with mushrooms and fungi, the breath of plants and plant products available for the wild forager is surprising. Of course, whilst some wild foods are delicious, others are just 'worthwhile' and some, though edible are not worth the effort.

Though the focus here is on British wild foods, as they are the ones I know best, many of the plants described are found throughout northern Europe. Others were introduced to Britain from the Mediterranean area by the Romans (including alexanders, sweet chestnut trees, almonds and many others), others (fruit trees most notably — including eating apples, cider apples and plum trees) were introduced by the Normans. The Victorians, inveterate plant hunters, introduced other plants from much further afield. Some of these, most notably Himalayan balsam and Japanese knotweed have become invasive weeds. Today there are introductions from North America (including ostrich ferns) which are on the verge of becoming garden escapees..

Of course, this site is a recipe site, so the focus is not on the biology and descriptions of various wild foods (though you can find these in our Guide to Wild Foods), but rather on the various dishes that can be cooked with wild food. This is why recipes have been sourced around the globe and either adapted for use with British wild foods (African recipes are a great source of inspiration) or are given in their original form if that wild food, or a cognate is found in Britain.

Wild Food Recipes and Cookery

Early cakes in Medieval Europe were also essentially bread: the most obvious differences between a 'cake' and 'bread' were the round, flat shape of the cakes and the cooking method, which turned cakes over once while cooking, while bread was left upright throughout the baking process. Though by the late middle ages, cakes would be flavoured with sweet spices and then with honey before being made richer with the inclusion of eggs and sugar.

I began my interest in wild foods with my desire to re-create ancient recipes. Almost by definition the earliest recipes we can make all include wild foods as staples. This revealed to me just how much we have forgotten about the wild edibles around us. Everything from the use of acorns and hazelnuts as winter staples to spices derived from dock, wild carrot and pepper dulse. But if I had not researched and experimented, I would never have thought of the use of bulrush stems as a carbohydrate staple.

Other wild foods have become so commonplace in usage that we forget they are wild foods (blackberries are an excellent example). In my childhood, it was blackberries, bullaces, hazelnuts, sloes, field mushrooms, horse mushrooms, giant puffballs and bilberries that we commonly collected. Later I collected wild garlic, dandelions, rose hips, wilding apples, stinging nettles, elder (berries and flowers), garlic mustard and gorse flowers.

It was only really whilst researching for this site and experimenting with wild foods that other common edibles came to my attention (hawthorn was a real revelation). Later I began taking people on local tours showing the wild edibles in their local vicinity (the challenge typically being to find at least 5 edible plants in any 2 metre stretch). With a little knowledge it is amazing just how many edible plants surround us, and finding 5 edibles in a small area is not really much of a challenge. Still, I am always learning and every year I add a few more plants to the wild food collection and currently I am up to 188 wild foods described (would you believe that the wild carrot was one of my latest additions?).

Today I have some kind of wild food with most meals and the diversity of wild foods on the doorstep means that some kind of wild food (be it gorse flowers, tree-ear mushrooms, bittercress, sorrel and pennywort) can even be sourced in the depths of winter.

If you are looking for a particular wild food, you can use the Wild Food Guide to find them.