Thought I’d reblog this great article by Cumbria Foodie. I’ve just located an impressive carpet of Pignuts (Conopodium majus) on the front bank of my son’s Middle School.
Pignuts are found all over the UK. They prefer dry, acidic soils. Look for them in open woods and meadows/grasslands.
Pignuts are a traditional country food, grubbed up and munched on for hundreds of years by children. (Back in the days before children spent all their free time gawping at screens and munching Wotsits.)
I first encountered them on the North Downs Way. A whole meadow edge full of delicate little carrot family plants, just 20cm high. They have just a few leaves, which are sparse, tiny, and divided (pinnate) only a few times. If you dig carefully down, following the thin white root, you get to the tuber – the ‘pignut’- which is the size of a hazelnut. It tastes like a cross between celery and an actual hazelnut, funnily enough.
After a good scrub and scraping off the brown outer coating, you’ll have creamy white pignuts. You can eat these raw, as they are or chopped into salad. Try a Pignut Waldorf salad with yoghurt and celery (or Lovage/Cow Parsley/Hogweed stems) Or you can slice them thinly and toast them in a dry pan.
How to approach this? Be honest and ask the school staff if I can dig some up (to the embarrassment and horror of my 10-year-old)? Sneak in under cover of night? Don a hi-vis and carry a clipboard, pretending to be a commercial archaeologist?
Joking aside, digging up plant roots requires the permission of the landowner. Even if I have permission, I only dig up wild plants when there are lots of them, and I only take as much as I need for one meal for myself and my son.
Watch this space.
xx Hedgewitch Kat xx
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