Not mush-room inside

Countryside column for 3^rd October

Autumn foraging can cut food bills

A friend of mine rather surprised the dinner table by discussing squirrels. Well, not just squirrels per se, but eating them.  And not just how to eat them, but the fact that the last one he’d tried had been rather tough.

As I dare say we were revelling in some really riveting subject such as the Great British Bakeoff at the time, his interjection went almost unnoticed. I think I may have made some comment such as “what do you expect if you choose to chomph on little Squirrel Nutkin?” or I might have paraphrased Malcolm Bradbury’s novel and said, sotto voce, “eating squirrels is wrong”.

It’s a difficult one isn’t it? You don’t want to offend him. Just because I don’t fancy squirrel, there really is not a great deal of reason why he shouldn’t consider it a delicacy. The Romans apparently just loved a roast dormouse – though I’d have thought there would be more fur than meat on the little critters. In some parts locusts are highly prized though I doubt if I’ll acquire the taste.

What I didn’t ask my dinner table companion was where he’d got his squirrel from. Catching one could be quite tricky.  Certainly Myrtle – who’s rather better adapted for the purpose – can only chase them to the foot of a tree and stand there barking while they make good their escape. 

Perhaps it was roadkill. This seems to me to be a particularly gruesome way of sourcing your protein. I know butchers are expensive but, even so, making do with the leavings of crows and other scavengers does strike me as a bit desperate. And gutting and cleaning the corpse would put me off food for the rest of the day.

Foraging, though, seems to be the new middle-class activity. This time of year no self-respecting cook round here would actually BUY apples or blackberries.  And one narrow lane I know borders a garden with a prolific vine. Picking grapes that overhang the footpath is one thing, but some people’s long-arm tactics of hooking bunches from deep inside the owner’s land seems a bit cheeky.

Personally I’ve stopped collecting wild mushrooms since that really bad tummy-ache of a couple of years back, but many friends still do. Often, though, they end up on the compost once photos have failed to distinguish them from the really poisonous varieties. Oh dear, back to the supermarket.