Berry Bonanza

The first rule of foraging is you do not talk about foraging...and even if you do, never reveal your top scavenging spots. This applies particularly in cases where the food being picked is the fruit equivalent of a gold nugget. Last week, I made a hedgerow discovery which made me inordinately happy (all I'll reveal is it was in the vicinity of the fantastically-named Razor Grinder's Wood, not far from my favourite haunt, the Pilgrim's Way).

Ladies and Gents, behold : the wild strawberry.





At the risk of sounding quite corny, there's something thrilling about accidentally stumbling across wild food when you're not even looking for it. The berries seemed to catch my eye like small glistening rubies in an innocuous bit of tatty hedgerow at the base of a telegraph pole.

You have to be quite dainty when collecting them (not easy with my sausage-fingered hands) as they squash quite easily, but by crikey are they worth the effort. You can faff about making jam with or them or preserving them in syrup, but the connoisseur's way to eat them is to keep it simple, just with a dollop of cream. So that, dear readers, is what I did.  

Granted, they were small, but much tastier than their cultivated cousins.