HELP YOURSELF: Fiona Houston (left) and Xa Milne have revived the art of foraging (Photograph: Rob McDougall)
AS MAO Zedong said, every journey starts with the first step. In the genteel Edinburgh suburb of Stockbridge, the beginning of a journey of enlightenment is more likely to call for a cup of tea. Or, in the case of Xa Milne and Fiona Houston, a mug of mint tea.
That was the ever-so-mundane starting point for the life-changing journey of exploration and foraging that culminated in the publication last week of Seaweed and Eat It, their recipe book-cum-guide to eating off the fat of Scotland's landscape. Their joint epiphany happened less than 18 months ago, shortly after they had dropped the kids off at school and were sitting down for a natter. Milne wanted a cup of mint tea, and instead of going to the cupboard, Houston simply went out into her garden, pulled up a couple of sprigs of mint and added boiling water.
A lightbulb went on. Both Milne and Houston are down-to-earth farmers' daughters from the Borders and Galloway respectively, and both grew up living off the land in more than just the most literal sense. Whether it was picking mushrooms, brambles and sloes, collecting shellfish from the seafront or making elderflower wine, both had a connection to the land that careers, children and city life had almost obliterated. Almost, but not quite.
"That cup of mint tea confirmed the fact that the world was indeed demented, and had been for as long as we could remember," says Milne. "It struck me as being very simple. You pick a leaf, it grows back. You use a tea bag, the box empties. This started a train of thought. How do you find plants like chamomile and wild thyme? I'd been buying linden (lime] blossom tea bags for ten years even though I walked under lime trees all the time."
If mint tea was the starting point, the tedium of the school run and the dog-walking provided the spur into action. Put simply, Milne and Houston, two high-achieving media types whose careers had been put on hold while they reared children, were numbed by routine. This was a way to inject some interest into the chores that consumed much of their weekdays. It was also a way to ensure their kids got away from televisions and PlayStations and enjoyed the simple country pursuits that kept their mothers fit and occupied as youngsters.
"All of a sudden, taking the dog for a walk could be turned into an adventure. You'd go somewhere new looking for a particular plant, or in summer we'd go for a walk as a family at the weekends and try to find wild mushrooms or pick nettles," says Houston. "The kids now know even more about plants and herbs than I did when I was their age, and they understand that not everything they eat has to come wrapped in cellophane."
Both women are the antithesis of the eco-warrior stereotype. Neither wears dungarees, knits her own Christmas presents or thinks that meat is murder; and neither would dream of following the lead of Milne's old mate Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and scoop up fresh roadkill for dinner. They explain that their mission has a little to do with good, old-fashioned Scottish frugality but, more importantly, that they want a closer relationship with their environment, one that their kids can enjoy too.
But there's no sense that their foraging will ever replace the need for regular visits to Tesco, Morrisons or the collection of butchers, bakers, greengrocers and delis in Stockbridge: wild garlic, seaweed or rock samphire will only ever augment their families' diet, not replace it.
Not that they couldn't exist off the land if they really wanted to. Although they travelled the length and breadth of Scotland in search of the weird and wonderful, one of the things that really surprised them was finding out just how much of what's on city-dwellers' doorsteps is edible. And it's not just green plants: in their year spent researching their guide to the art of foraging, they caught lobsters and crabs within an hour of Edinburgh, ate mussels, oysters and scallops, learned to distinguish every type of mushroom, and found berries in the most unusual places.
Yet they never set out to prove they could live off Scotland's larder, or that we could all be poachers if we chose to. Their plan was simply to prove that there is food all around us, even in the middle of the city in midwinter. That much was proved to me when we met for a morning's foraging a fortnight ago. Rather than just read all about it, or have the process explained to me, I wanted to see how it worked in practice. The plan was for Milne and Houston to show me what you could harvest in the space of one decent walk with the dog. Given that it was still February, my expectations were low.
We started off by driving down to the River Almond, parking next to the Cramond Brig pub and walking along the riverbank. This is the worst time of the year for finding much worth eating, yet it didn't take long. Within a minute we had found a big patch of wild garlic, although for some reason the dynamic duo thought that it made sense to carry on upriver.
Within ten minutes of meandering along we came to a steep bank that was a swathe of vivid green. We could smell the garlic from 20 paces and ten minutes later the basket was full to overflowing. We'd concentrated on taking the smallish plants on the grounds that they're the most succulent and pungent, and the smell was both gorgeous and overwhelming.
The women's venture had included a crash course in the study of old Scottish recipe and gardening books, from which they learned an incredible amount about the uses of each plant, including many that we no longer see fit to eat. I knew that eating garlic regularly would cut down on my chance of having a heart attack or a stroke, but the two amateur botanists were more interested in its other property: a hangover cure. That could come in very handy.
Although the mint tea moment was when they both realised this could be a common shared purpose, Milne and Houston had, in fact, already been thinking along those lines before this. Milne persuaded the celebrated food critic AA Gill to write the foreword to the book because years ago the two of them had spent a summer cooking in the Highlands, making soup with the little green crabs discarded from the bottom of lobster creels. Even when she moved to Edinburgh she had cultivated an allotment; a curiosity about nature is ingrained in her.
Houston's mind had already begun working in this vein after she went for a walk with her sister Val, who picked some wild garlic and crushed it in her hands, offering it to her to smell. She had been stunned to find that she hadn't recognised one of the most common of edible plants. That was the moment when she first realised the extent of her disconnection from the land.
She had taken another huge step towards the good life when out walking on the Fife coast with Wei, a Chinese friend on her first trip to Scotland. Wei was gobsmacked at the sight of tons of kelp at the water's edge. Kelp is much sought-after in the Far East, and as the main ingredient in miso soup is phenomenally expensive; for Wei, it was like discovering gold sovereigns littering the beach.
And so to the next leg of our foraging journey. Seaweed is another plentiful food source at this time of year, and all types are edible. Dulse and carrageen were considered real delicacies until very recently; they are best eaten dried, and crofters would wrap pieces around a poker and put it into the fire before eating it warm five minutes later.
We found all kinds of seaweed along the front at Cramond, but as the weather closed in and stinging stair rods of sleet began to assail us, we quickly grabbed some dulse and made a dash for the car. When we arrived back in Stockbridge ten minutes later, we went straight to Herbie's, a delicatessen dedicated to the slow-food movement which has made its name providing outstanding organic and additive-free food.
Milne and Houston had delivered the same ingredients the previous day, and as we handed over the bag of dulse and a basket laden with wild garlic, we were passed back the fruits of the previous day's haul – a huge bowl of green pesto made from wild garlic, pine nuts and olive oil, plus four large loaves of sourdough bread infused with black specks of the dried dulse seaweed.
I love garlic and could have eaten the whole lot. But to make sure that it wasn't just pride at my foraging skills that was blinding my tastebuds, I ran a taste test back at the office. I felt like the kid who has just finished a school woodwork project and brings some hideous object home to Mum and Dad, convinced it's a thing of beauty. I nervously opened up the container holding the pesto and within seconds the whole place was reeking of garlic. "It smells like an Italian deli in here," said one colleague, laughing. "What on earth are you eating?"
Five minutes later, though, I'd press-ganged three colleagues into trying the fruits of my labours. Initially dubious (they are, after all, journalists), all three came back for more. Any day now, I thought, they'll be down on the banks of the River Almond or scouring the scrub beside the Water of Leith. Especially when they discover it's a hangover cure.
My colleagues were, I later found out, merely mirroring the reaction of Milne and Houston's husbands, Simon and Duncan, and their kids Lydia, Adair, Mungo, Lorne and Geordie, whose initial scepticism soon gave way to a fully fledged love affair with foraging. Weekends would be spent on the Fife coast or up in the Pentlands, evenings passed with heads in books trying to track down old recipes that made the best use of plants that were no longer being eaten. The children would even cook dishes themselves, or make cordials.
Friends around the country were dragooned into action, and vast numbers of recipes were tried and tested. When I was young I was dragged off to the moors each weekend to pick bilberries (or blaeberries) and blackberries, but when I tried to persuade my own children to follow suit recently I was met with blank incomprehension followed by outright revolt. Houston and Milne faced similar challenges, although generally with more success as their kids came through the tantrums, eventually developing a deep fascination with the outdoors.
What these two Edinburgh mothers are doing reflects wider developments in our attitudes towards food. Some plants, such as lovage, are making a comeback because chefs enjoy working with them, but others are being reintroduced to the mainstream for the same reasons that our ancestors once employed them.
Take sweet cicely, for example: it is 800 times sweeter than sugar but has none of the calories, a fact that is interesting many soft-drinks manufacturers. Then there's meadowsweet, which, as well as making a lovely cordial and being used to flavour traditional beers, is also a fever-suppressing plant from which the drug aspirin is extracted. Heathpea, a plant that grows like a weed in the Pentlands, was once used by famished crofters as an appetite suppressant. And did you know that seaweed had significant anti-carcinogenic qualities?
Although lots of herbs and plants have passed out of common usage, the slow-food movement and the willingness of Scottish gastronomes to reintroduce traditional ingredients is leading to a change in attitudes. Last week, for instance, I ate at La Garrigue, a French restaurant in Edinburgh (see review on page 35), and was surprised to see dandelion stems listed as the ingredient in one salad – and to find that chef Jean-Michel Gauffre goes out foraging in the forests for chanterelles to use in his dishes.
It perhaps says something about me that I still find this surprising; it's as if I haven't quite got to grips with the fact that 'proper' food can come in all shapes and guises. That, at least, is a lesson that will soon be deeply embedded thanks to the foraging lessons provided courtesy of Xa Milne and Fiona Houston. r
• Seaweed and Eat It: A Family Foraging and Cooking Adventure is published by Virgin Books (£10.99). For more on foraging, see Sunday Supplement
