The perfect foraging kit

It's that lush time of year when wild garlic covers the forest floor and hedgerows are soon to be bursting with elderflower blossom and Jack-in-the-Hedge. Don't let it go to waste. We've compiled the perfect clothing and kit, from waterproof forest boots to a horn-gilded blade, to ensure a fruitful forage, whatever the weather...

Field Stool

They say good things come in threes. Well here's a three-legged stool comprised of three simple materials, English ash, brass and leather. When folded you can carry this little beauty over the shoulder while you scan the hedgerows and use it while you're cooking your foraged bounty on a campfire. This is a Lissom & Muster collaboration with leather goods maker Cherchbi; using leather sourced from a Derbyshire tannery. Every step of the process, from sourcing the Hereford cattle hides, to leather tanning, to forging brassware, to finishing, is a British product or process.

£210

 

Forest boots

Something light, durable, waterproof and, of course, pleasing to the eye – that's pretty much what we want from a walking boot, right? Jonas Lundhag's Forest Boot is a fine cross between a rubber boot and a walking boot and it ticks the right boxes for us – it's leather, it's beautiful and it's waterproof, all the while being surprisingly lightweight.

£210

 

Hunter Flask

Another fine Lissom & Muster collaboration with British leather goods maker Cherchbi, this flask is something that should always be in your rucksack or field bag. We love it, firstly, because it's called a Hunter Flask. What a name. And secondly, it comes with four stainless steel cups so you can share a hedgerow gin with your foraging buddies on a well-earned break.

£120

 

Horn blade

A good sturdy knife is what you need to cut through branches or mushroom stems and this Barlow Knife by Taylors Eye Witness is just the job. They're handmade in Sheffield and each knife is unique because of the varying markings and colourings of the ramshorn handle. A fine country knife to keep in your pocket, always. Even if it's just to stroke and fondle the ramshorn handle from time to time.

£85

 

Filson coat

This Filson 'Alaska' fit coat is lightweight and strong, and allows for layering and mobility in the outdoors, so there's room for you to wear chunky knitwear underneath, if needs be. It is wind and water repellent, further enhanced by Filson's paraffin-based wax, and comes in a choice of Otter Green or Brown. The perfect outdoor coat, built to last a lifetime, folks.

£265

 

Field bag

For keeping your OS map and your hedgerow guidebook nice and dry, this Brady Ariel Trout bag is made from triple-layered waterproof canvas and trimmed with leather and brass fittings - all produced by English craftsmen.  It also comes with a removable, washable rubber liner. Now that's an Ernest bag if we ever saw one.

£150

 

Lissom & Muster sources and commissions the very best, authentic products, skilfully made for life in our landscape. Call in their beautiful shop on Tib Lane in the centre of Manchester or check them out online.

Tales from the tool shed

From the haemorrhoid-healing Patron Saint of spades to the Anglo-French battle of who could make the best watering can, Bill Laws encourages you to ponder the trusty mud-caked tools piled up in the corner of your shed, and explore their fascinating, if not rather strange, history...

Every tool has a tale to tell, it seems, none more so than the rather unremarkable looking gardening tools gathering dust in your shed. Author, gardener and busker Bill Laws has compiled 50 of these tales into one book RHS Tales From The Tool Shed and has given Ernest a peep at some of the good stuff.

The spade

Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932) offered no-nonsense advice on the spade: “Watch a man digging: then take a spade . . . and do it.” 

During Northern Ireland’s troubles, digging was dangerous. The whisper “Watch out: he digs with the wrong foot" signalled the debate over which foot you used: the right (ostensibly a Protestant preference) or the left (supposedly favoured by Catholics). 

The spade’s patron saint is Saint Fiacre. Offered all the land he could dig in a day for a new monastery, he turned over nine acres at Saint-Fiacre-en-Brie, his digging eclipsed only by his reputation for curing haemorrhoids.

The hoe

The ground is dug, the seeds are sown: now the weeds begin to grow. 

The great outdoors man, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), celebrated the hoe as he worked his bean patch beside Walden Pond in Massachusetts: “Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead.”

Whether you opt for a thrust or a draw hoe, (the first is pushed through the soil, the second drawn back), pay for quality and regularly run a sharpening stone along its leading edge. 

The secateurs

When the first beans come to fruition around June, the gardener hand picks her crop or employs that sensible 19th-century invention, secateurs. 

Count Bertrand de Molleville (1744–1818) escaped the guillotine during the French Revolution and fled to England where, in his spare time, he developed the secateurs. He designed them as an aid for the vigneron pruning the grape vines, but they soon made their mark in the garden.  

Today’s secateurs, essential for trimming roses or cutting hazel wands for peas sticks, range from Swiss-made Felco and Finnish-made Fiskars to Japanese Okatsune snips. 

The watering can 

The French and the English were separated by more than a stretch of water – the English Channel, or as the French say, La Manche – during Victorian times. They were also at odds over the best watering can. 

Matched against the Englishman’s stout, galvanized two-handled can was the French gardener’s arrosoir, its swan-neck so finely balanced that watering required only a light shift of the index finger. Former civil servant John Haws liked the balancing act of the French watering device and began manufacturing his own version at Clapton, London in the 1880s. It turned the watering can into a gardening icon.  

Bill Laws is the author of Tales From The Tool Shed: The History and Use of Fifty Garden Tools and Fifty Plants That Changed the Course of History. Since he started busking with his soprano sax three years ago, he’s been working on a history of street music.

billlaws.com

Merguez spiced lamb and wild garlic wrap

Sink your gnashers into a warm, soft wrap filled with juicy spiced lamb, crunchy slaw and freshly picked wild garlic. Dorian Kirk of A Rule of Tum shows us how it's done.

Wild garlic is a free and abundant gift of the woods this time of year and is perfect in soups and salads. It's especially good wilted in butter with poached eggs. But if you fancy packing a real flavoursome punch, give wild garlic pesto a whirl, sprinkled on pulled merguez spiced lamb, celeriac and yoghurt slaw, pickled onions and roast peppers and rocket, served in a warm wrap or with flat breads. Imagine sinking your gnashers into that on a sunny spring day.

Merguez spiced lamb

  • 1.5 kg lamb shoulder
  • ½ dessert spoon cumin seeds
  • ½ dessert spoon coriander seeds
  • ½ dessert spoon fennel seeds
  • ½ dessert spoon pepper corns
  • ½ cinnamon stick
  • 1 tsp cayenne pepper
  • 1 dsp smoked paprika
  • 2 dsp salt
  • 4 cloves garlic
  • 1 dsp fresh rosemary
  • Water to cover

Pickled onions and peppers

  • 3 red peppers halved and de-seeded
  • 3 red onions, peeled and sliced
  • 500ml red wine vinegar
  • 330g caster sugar
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 2 sprigs rosemary
  • Salt
  • 100ml red wine vinegar

Celeriac slaw

  • 1 head celeriac, cut into very thin matchsticks
  • 2 cucumbers, grated and squeezed
  • 200g very thick yogurt
  • 200g mayonnaise
  • 1 clove garlic, very finely grated
  • 40ml white wine vinegar
  • 10g caster sugar
  • ½ bunch of mint, finely chopped
  • Salt to taste

Wild garlic pesto

  • 200g wild garlic blanched
  • ½ bunch coriander
  • 30g grated parmesan
  • 1 clove garlic, finely grated
  • 1 lemon, juiced
  • 1 anchovy fillet
  • 300ml rapeseed or olive oil
  • Seasoning

Method

Toast the whole spices in a dry pan. Whizz them in a coffee grinder with the cinnamon stick pieces, cayenne pepper, smoked paprika, salt, garlic and rosemary. Mix the whizzed spices with enough olive oil to make a sticky but loose paste, smother over the lamb and marinade overnight.

Cover lamb with water or stock, cook at 130˚c for about 5 hours until falling of the bone. Strain the liquid into a pan and reduce by two thirds. Pull the lamb, discarding any bones and sinew. Pour the reduced liquor over the pulled lamb and reheat when ready.

For the peppers and onions, bring the 500ml red wine vinegar to the boil with the sugar. Add the sliced onions, stir and leave to cool, preferably overnight. Coat the peppers with oil and roast on high heat for 15 minutes until it blisters, sprinkle over the garlic and rosemary for the final 5 minutes, remove, sprinkle with the 100ml red wine vinegar and cover until cool. Once cool, peel and slice. Strain the onions and mix with the peppers.

Mix together the mayonnaise, yoghurt, seasoning, sugar, garlic and mint for celeriac slaw. Pour over the celeriac and cucumber, mix thoroughly and season to taste.

For the wild garlic pesto, blitz all the ingredients except the oil in a food processor until fine, slowly add the oil, adjust the acidity and seasoning to taste.

Serve the hot lamb, slaw, pickles and pesto with wraps or flat breads and rocket.

dorian.jpg

Dorian Kirk is head chef of A Rule of Tum, a supper club based in Herefordshire. A Rule of Tum is about creating honest, seasonal dishes crafted from the ingredients they find right on their doorstep.

Subscription Smörgåsbord: win a Peppermongers gift pack

“The world’s best pepper. Not be sneezed at.” We featured the awesome Peppermongers in issue one and we liked them so much we wanted to share their peppery goodness with a lucky subscriber.

The winner can either opt for the traditional Classic range, or, for the more adventurous chef, the Exotic range, which features the Indonesian long pepper. Tom of Peppermongers told us what so special about this pepper: "It's the one the three musketeers ate, the Romans loved, and featured in the Kama Sutra." Need he say more? Peppermongers have shaken up the world of condiments since Tom sampled some Tellicherry Black Pepper while holidaying in Kerala and realised the pepper we're used to in this country is often poor quality. He's striving to change all that, one peppercorn at a time.

To be in with a chance of winning a Peppermonger gift pack, click the pic below and subscribe to Ernest Journal (opt in to letting us see your email address, so we can let you know you've won).

Terms and conditions:

  1. The closing time and date is 11.59pm on 6 April 2014. Entries after that date will not be considered.
  2. The prize is a Peppermongers gift pack worth £9.99. The prize is non-transferable and no cash alternative can be offered.
  3. See our full terms and conditions.

Sour beer with the Wild Beer Co

Married to the manager of a real ale pub and frequenter of beer festivals, features editor Abi thought she was a seasoned ale drinker. Turns out there's an underworld of craft beer bubbling away, being tapped by those lucky enough to sniff it out...

Whenever I tell people I'm a real ale drinker, they often look me up and down and say, "you don't look like one." Meaning what, exactly? I don't have a barrel gut and a receding hairline?

Thing is, in this day and age, there is no such thing as a typical real ale drinker. And it turns out, the term 'real ale' has become a rather faded, old-fashioned British idiom. It's all about craft beer now. As in, beer crafted by tiny, independent breweries sprouting up all over the country, inspired by the traditional craft of real ale but experimenting with wild and wacky flavours, yeasts and hops, bucking the trend led by the US, Belgium, Germany and Spain. And in its wake, micropubs and craft beer houses are popping up as if from nowhere, championing these fine breweries on rotation, attracting curious drinkers of all ages and sexes.

I discovered one such brewery in Somerset, The Wild Beer Co, when I interviewed founders Andrew Cooper and Brett Ellis for our feature in issue one of Ernest. They cut their teeth working for the same brewery in Bristol and, keen to take the craft in an experimental direction, joined forces to form their own brewery, dabbling with wild yeasts, foraged ingredients and brewing in whisky, wine and cider oak barrels. 

They also produce something called sour beer, which was a new one on me, but apparently there's a huge tradition of the stuff in Belgium and Germany. I tasted some. Yep. I'll be having some of that again. In fact, while staying in London recently, I couldn't help stopping by a craft beer pub on Goodge street and quenching my thirst with a bottle of Sour Dough, a lip-smacking cross between rough cider and grapefruit juice. Damn good. 

You can read the full interview with The Wild Beer Co in issue one of Ernest Journal, on sale now.