Making the most of autumn’s seasonal bounty

The directions were to guide me through a part of North Yorkshire I had never visited, and they were a throwback to the days before SatNav.

“Go over the bridge to a roundabout and take the second exit. After you leave the town you need to take a turning on the right. Follow this twisty and turny road for several miles until you come to a T junction. Turn right, cross over the hump-backed bridge, look for the first left-hand turning and follow this road for...”

I emailed back: “If you give me your postcode, my SatNav will direct me right to your door.”

“We don’t have a postcode,” was the reply. “It’s a wood.”

The directions were spot on. Chris Bax was sitting on a log and waving to me as I made the final turn as per his instructions.

The wood is in a fairly remote part of the Vale of Mowbray, between the River Swale and the White Horse of Kilburn on distant Sutton Bank. It is 18.5 acres and a mixture of broad-leafed trees like oak and birch and conifers like Corsican and Scots pine. There are also a lot of classic hedgerow bushes and shrubs around the fringes and along some of the wider woodland tracks.

Chris has become a leading expert on finding food in the wild, and earlier this year he predicted that the warmest spring on record would produce a record crop of autumn fruits.

“We’ve had optimum growing conditions with a harsh, cold winter and a spring with little frost and the warmest ever temperatures,” he said at the launch of the Women’s Institute’s Real Jam Competition.

“It’s a perfect climatic event for our nation’s wild fruit and berries, and great news if you want to make your own jam.”

Sure enough, in Chris’s wood everywhere you look there are blackberries, elderberries, rowan berries, sloe berries, hawthorn haws and rose hips as well as the odd crab apple tree. It’s the perfect location for teaching people how to find and cook food from the countryside.

Chris and his wife, Rose, bought the wood to use it sensitively for their respective passions: Chris for teaching people how to forage and acquire a variety of woodland skills, Rose for turning felled trees into incredible sculptures.

We set off on one of his foraging routes. The first fruits to be added to the basket were juicy looking black sloes – a small relative of the plum – picked from a blackthorn bush. They give a nice deep colour and a bit of acidity to the jam.

The hedgerows are blood-red with hawthorn haws and we test them to make sure the flesh is squishy around the central stone, but Chris cautions anyone who is taking beta blocker medication. The haws are a highly effective beta blocker themselves, and eating jam containing them might increase the dosage beyond a safe level.

The rose hips are super-rich in vitamin C – a syrup was made from them to keep children healthy in the Second World War – and the elderberries are another brilliant provider of colour. In no time we have gathered enough fruits to make one medium-sized Kilner jar of what Chris calls Hedge Jelly.

But he can’t resist demonstrating how much more food there is lurking among the foliage. In any one week from March to November, he says, he can find 35 edible plants here, and it seems like we get pretty close to that figure as we stroll.

The burdock plant is actually a thistle, and its creamy-white root has long been used as a blood purifier and, more famously, as the licorice-tasting element in a once-popular drink known as dandelion and burdock, which became the Coca Cola of Victorian times.

We pick up a few early acorns, and Chris decides they are not yet ready for collecting. They were used as ersatz coffee beans in the war years, but shelled and roasted Chris finds that the chocolate, Horlicks-like flavour makes a great infusion for ice-cream.

“It’s a magnificent nut,” he says. “I peel them and leech out a lot of their tannic acid with a couple of changes of boiling water, but once they’re done they are like chestnuts, lovely when used in cakes and biscuits or as a stuffing served with game.

“It’s really a shame that we don’t eat more of them. The oak is almost our national tree yet acorns are never seen in our shops. If you go into a supermarket in Korea you’ll find acorn flour and acorn noodles.”

We stop to sample the stalks of some spear thistles, which taste pretty much like a thinner version of celery, and Chris stoops to pick a few strands of a small green-leaved plant.

It tastes like fresh peas. “Believe it or not,” he says, “this is common chickweed. People rip it out of their gardens and throw it away, but in a salad bowl it’s delicious.”

Further on we sample sheep sorrel, and a mouth-burning yet flavoursome weed from a pond. “Water pepper,” says Chris. “It is hot and delicious, but somehow there is no tradition of using it here, yet the Japanese use it in their cookery.”

There’s a bountiful supply of fungi in the wood, and we gather some common puffballs – cutting into them first to ensure the flesh is white and not yellow – and some small brown mushrooms called the deceiver. He lets me take them home to make a bowl of pasta with woodland fungi.

At his campfire we set about making jelly and Chris waxes on the philosophy of eating from the wild.

“It allows you to be in touch with the seasons. A lot of people think we’re in a time of recession and say things like isn’t it great we can go out and get free food? I don’t like that particular attitude. By calling it free it’s given no value, and this stuff has got absolutely heaps of value spiritually and nutritionally. There’s the historical aspect, too. The whole foraging thing and cooking over an open fire sort of reconnects us with the hunter-gatherer instinct I think we all have inside us.”

Recipe for Chris Bax’s Hedge Jelly

Collect blackberries, elderberries, rowan berries, hawthorn haws, rose hips, sloes and crab apples.

For every ½lb of berries add a couple of cut crab apples.

Put in a pan, cover with water and boil for up to 20 minutes.

Squeeze through a fine sieve or jelly bag to produce the purple-black liquid.

For every pint of liquid add 1lb of sugar and the juice of a lemon.

Put back onto the heat and boil until it reaches setting point (found when a small drop on a cold plate wrinkles or does not run).

Remove from the heat and pour into sterilised jars.

Jam but not Jerusalem

Details of Chris Bax’s wild food and foraging courses can be found at www.tastethewild.co.uk or email [email protected]

Entries for the Women’s Institute Real Jam Festival 2011 sponsored by British cooker manufacturer, Stoves, can be submitted now. The top prize is £1,000-worth of Stoves kitchen appliances.

Details of how to enter are on www.wirealjamfestival.com

A free “Wild Jam Maker” app for iPhones is now available from the App Store.