Wild Garlic Pesto: UK spring walks
An ode to our family’s annual wild garlic foraging.
Place one pair of walking boots on legs unseasoned to dirt tracks unctuous with soft spring downpour and sun’s partial glare. Take them to paths sketched through landscapes sloped with trees unyielding to the season’s patterning of trials, and feel bones and muscles settle into the loamy give of winter’s fall.
Fix your breath with the canopy to capture what transient sunlight plays through the branches.
A breath of spring is worth so much more than what is advertised throughout months of rainy concrete pavements and unseasonable flowers askew in leaky buckets seeping into supermarket floors.
…instead…
We park the car on the same village road every year. The hill is a pinprick painting of purple bluebells amongst wild garlic held ransom by fertile land. A palette composed of colours so comfortable to me that they fit together like a lullaby. My Skye Boat Song of a landscape.
Each hazel tree is the potential subject of our apprenticeship. They remind us of the well-worn hands of a now lost family friend who could skilfully select a thumb-stick to last a lifetime.
We walk towards the sky, uphill and away from the pub that we know, when our work is done, be open for warm ale and bags of crisps split open to share.
Sometimes we walk in silence, other times shoulder to shoulder, though this poses the risk of catching our toes on tree roots half hidden by the forest floor.
One spot always serves us well. An odd crater, like a giant has taken an ice-cream scoop of earth from the forest. Here, 10 feet away from the path, there is a steep, curved bank where a ring of oaks peer down at us slithering towards the perfect leaves. They’re not too small to be overwhelming punchy, not so big that they’re nothing to write home about.
We are the foraging gladiators of the forest, the Roman general oaks judging how our year’s training has served our wild garlic searching skills.
There are rarely other walkers. Those that do come past tactfully ignore the barer patches of waxy wild garlic leaves around our feet.
When the white flowers of the wild garlic are out we pick those too. Each year we talk of picking the delicate heads for salads, though are yet to actually do it.
Pick as much as you need, no more.
From Favaiken, Sweden, a chef speaks of the place of taste in the passing of time – ‘For any creative person, whatever you produce is going to be the sum of everything that you have with you – what you have experienced and what you have carried around.’*
For me, though, wild garlic pesto is not a sum of what and where I have been and where I am, it is a marker in my life as a sum yet to be solved. Our allium pilgrimage that stretches backwards and forwards in time.
Take one pair of boots and in your wanderings find a life ongoing.
Wild garlic may not be as abundant where you are as it is in the nooks that we know. So use what you have around you, with some suggestions for this below. We did freeze the wild garlic one year, though with the unfortunate outcome of an odd tasting apple crumble that had also been frozen nearby!
Ingredients (for one small jar)
50g wild garlic leaves, washed
30g walnuts
30g cheddar
80ml olive oil
Salt and pepper
OR
50g basil
30g pinenuts
30g parmesan cheese, grate
80ml olive oil
Salt and pepper
OR
1 jar sundried tomatoes in oil OR sundried tomatoes rehydrated in water
2 crushed garlic cloves
80ml of the oil from the jarred tomatoes, or plain olive oil
30g almonds, chopped
Teaspoon chilli flakes
Salt and pepper
OR
50g spinach leaves
30g hazelnuts
60ml olive oil
50ml mascarpone
Zest of half a lemon
Salt and pepper
Method
Place everything besides the oil in a blender (or into a bowl and use a hand blender). Whizz it up, slowly adding the oil until you get the consistency you’re aiming for.
If you’re without a blender, finely chop/grate the ingredients as appropriate, and whisk, adding as the oil as you see fit.
Use as you like –, in sauces, stews, soups and spread on sandwiches. Whatever floats your boat.
*This was Magnus Nilsson on Chef’s Table, Netflix