I've been asking every restaurant that I've visited recently where they get their fish. It's a bore for whoever I'm eating with, but the results are interesting. Even at the restaurants that boast their devotion to "sustainable" sourcing, the waiters usually have little idea what the provenance of the fish is. At one Edinburgh restaurant I was told, with some pride, that the scallops were from the west coast and definitely not diver-caught—though this is in fact the only environmentally friendly option.
Monkfish is a particular problem. Chefs love this gloriously ugly bottom-feeder for the texture of the flesh of its long tail. Indeed, it's said that in the days when monkfish were dredged up by the scallop-boats as by-catch, the skippers would sell it on to the fish processors who would chop up the tails and pass the bits off as scampi. But now monkfish is endangered in the North sea and Scotland. If you care, it should not be eaten without positive assurance that it was line-caught, not trawled. Yet at two very right-on restaurants I visited recently, a Conran outlet and one of the Loch Fyne chain, the waiters had no idea where the monkfish had come from.
The problem, of course, is that the word "sustainable," while increasingly exciting for concerned consumers, has no official definition. Nor is it likely to get one—although organisations like the Marine Stewardship Council are trying through their certification scheme to raise awareness of the principle. But at the moment it languishes in the tawdry vocabulary of food retail marketing along with other much-abused words like "farmhouse," "fresh" and "natural."
Even when terms have recognised and policed definitions—as "organic" does—they are still routinely (and sometimes fraudulently) misused. This is partly because of the tragic ignorance of customers. At a food industry trade fair recently, I met a young man flogging a pre-warmed pie concept. One of the pies was labelled "Genuine free-range lamb with rosemary!" "So that won't be the lamb that lives in cages then?" I asked. "No one's ever complained," he said.
Foraging for wild garlic
Some people look out for colt's foot or blackthorn blossom as the early signs of spring. When the snowdrops fade, I start peering into still-leafless woodland for a much more useful plant: wild garlic. This year I found my first crop early, for Scotland: in the second week of March, trudging by a burn through a copse of bare beech trees in Angus. As ever, the wild garlic signals its presence by smell—a gorgeous green tang that rises when you tread on it and has other walkers turning their heads. At that stage the plant is a unremarkable set of green spikes in the dead leaves, but by the time you read this the leaves will have broadened and the little white flowers will be blooming.
Some cooks prize the blossoms most, for their crystal-delicate garlickiness. But I'll happily eat the plant at any stage until it disappears in June. The tiny bulbs don't taste so very different from the commercial sort, but they're fun to put in soups, where they look like tiny pearls. In Angus we quickly stuffed a bag full of garlic leaves (in the Edinburgh deli Valvona & Crolla the next day I was pleased to see wild garlic being sold at £30 a kilo). We stuffed partridges with it, made chicken and garlic soup, and wild garlic bread. Best was the tangy, violently green pesto we made to preserve the remains of the haul (recipe at the end of the column).
This last idea comes from Xa Milne and Fiona Houston's Seaweed and Eat It (Virgin Books), the most entertaining and usable of the shelf-full of foraging guides published recently. It may say something about the national mood that there are so many instruction manuals and television programmes around to teach us to eat for nothing. Last summer I spent a happy evening scavenging in the bins outside a Marks & Spencer with a group of anarchist "freegans." I'm still getting emails from television researchers asking for the freegans' numbers, so that they might restage the event and the feast which followed for broadcast.
Foods that are "free" and "wild" obviously tickle the same modern middle-class instincts as foods that are labelled "sustainable" and "local." But picking porcini, mussels and wild garlic is not quite the same activity as fossicking for the tubers and leaves, such as pig nut or fat hen (for which Houston and Milne provide mildly inspiring recipes), that we'd have to chew on in a real economic downturn. And while I'm grateful for ideas for beefing up the seaweed dulse (known as "the vegetarian's oyster"), I don't believe the authors really managed to feed their children vanilla-flavoured carrageen jelly. My foraging mother tried that on me as a child, and I disliked it so much that I spirited it off the table and into my shoe.
Alex Renton's pesto recipe. Take about 200g of wild garlic leaves, and process with the juice of half a lemon, 100g grated parmesan and a handful of lightly toasted pine nuts. Add a light olive oil until the mix is suitably fluid. Salt and pepper to taste. Bottle and store in the fridge until needed: if you find the taste overpowering, mix with ordinary (basil-based) pesto.
