We British are not famed for culinary daring. An adventurous meal has traditionally been one that lacks potatoes. Nose-to-tail eating is mostly anathema to a nation that prefers the blandest part of the chicken because it’s the easiest to cut up.
Poverty and shortage were not enough to spur our creativity during postwar rationing. The food writer Elizabeth David recounted a Scottish schoolmaster’s wife who recoiled in horror at her freshly gathered chanterelles. A fisherman did the same on spotting her with a crab, both reacting with the same appalled cry: ‘You’re never going to eat those dirty things?’
Few in Britain praise dishes of pig’s ears or chicken knees, but over the past 30 years our culinary character has improved. Most people enjoy the virtues of crab and chanterelles, even though few would know how to find either themselves. Hail, then, wild garlic: easier to grapple with than crab or wild fungi, and abundantly in season.
Hramsan was the Old English plural for wild garlic (making its other name, ramsons, a double plural). The Oxford English Dictionary notes only that the bulbous root of the plant is edible. Nearby, more words are lavished on explaining randan, an archaic style of rowing. Priorities, priorities. Across Europe, ramsons are named bear’s garlic, for the notion that bears love them and help spread the plants by digging them up. Our British synonyms are blunter: stinking lilies, Devil’s posy, onion stinkers, snake’s food or stinking Jenny.
I remember the scent of wild garlic from rain-drenched Easter holidays in which our parents’ country rambles were forced marches for us kids. More recently, dragging my own complaining progeny for hours across the gardens at Waddesdon Manor, we stumbled across a carpet of broad green blades, fretted by white flowers. Armfuls went into my backpack, stuffed down around packets of crisps and water bottles.
Geoffrey Grigson declared wild garlic’s visual display was ‘not to be despised’ because of the smell. Gerard Manley Hopkins thought ramsons the most beautiful of forest floorings, but not much more. As a 1597 herbal grudgingly said, wild garlic ‘maye very well be eaten in April and Maie with butter, of such as are of a strong constitution, and labouring men’. Gusto has never been the signature of British cooking.
Given Britain’s cooking culture, we deserve some sympathy – what we don’t deserve is respect. We too easily talk about the foods we dislike the same way we talk of being bad at maths, proud of our failures.
Our nation’s long habit of ignoring wild garlic is one of those historical failures for which we can atone, delicately – with a soufflé
Britain’s global fortunes have declined, but something has gone unexpectedly right with our national spirit. The French chef Marcus Boulestin (Elizabeth David quoted him approvingly) thought ‘peace and happiness begin, geographically, where garlic is used in cooking.’ For the first time since our forebears turned their backs departing legionaries, that includes us. We have become vast and enthusiastic consumers of garlic.
In seasonally conscious restaurants, ramsons have become fashionable. We have no strong tradition of ramson eating – Ben Mervis’s comprehensive recent British Cook Book contains none; neither did Richard Briggs’s 1788 predecessor. Our nation’s long habit of ignoring wild garlic is one of those historical failures for which we can atone, delicately – with a soufflé.
Finding ramsons has some of the thrill of hunting with none of the blood; peril comes only from muddles with bluebells or lily of the valley. Raw, the leaves of wild garlic are pungent and strong. Heat them a little and they fade into softness. Their sharp, green bite mellows into an emerald richness when fully cooked, a revelation for a cuisine long defined by beige. Cooked en masse like spinach, or whizzed up into a pesto, they provide the kiss of spring. Seed pods and flowers are all edible.
Something has gone right in Britain to make us eat better than our parents did, and their parents before them. Peace and happiness begin where garlic is used in cooking, and perhaps hope does too. Our increasing love for wild garlic is a small but hopeful sign.
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