Wild Food: A Complete Guide for Foragers

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He was Honorary Garden Manager at Eccleston Square in London and in 2010 was awarded the MBE for services to London Garden Squares. This all means that anyone wanting to honour his memory has a range of choices: he created a real live living garden plus a pile of brilliant books (he also made a wonderful online foraging course for the Idler Academy, and appeared as a guest on A Drink with the Idler in June 2020). Includes information on mushroom anatomy such as gill attachments, cap textures, how to do spore prints etc The oldest recipe I try, from Florence White’s 1932 collection Good Things in England, and with an attribution that implies it may be Victorian, boils the nettles for 10 minutes before adding them to the soup base, while Little blanches his for just 60 seconds. Chef Paul Gayler’s book Great Homemade Soups sits squarely in the middle of that, at five minutes, while Phillips just adds the leaves raw to the soup, where they simmer for a quarter of an hour. Phillips published books about trees and ferns and wild flowers before he got to mushrooms. He didn’t think the publisher at Pan would go for it. The British, he suggests, had always been funny about fungi. While across Europe and beyond natives would be out in fields and forests as if on pilgrimage in mushroom season, in the UK there was no tradition. “We were famous for herbs from medieval times, of course,” says Phillips. “But those books tend to refer to mushrooms as ‘the spit of Jesus’ or ‘the fruit of the devil’. Because they grew up from nowhere overnight they were associated with witchcraft.”

This is an easy-to-use mycological key, that takes you through a series of YES/NO questions about the observable features of your specimen until you arrive at a genus. No microscopy is required, but you will probably need to do spore prints to use it properly. He wrote and presented two six-part TV series on gardening (BBC & Channel 4). Famed for his ebullient personality and garish red glasses, he has become a well-recognised figure in the world of gardening.Phillips has been a natural nonconformist. Three months into his national service in the RAF in Canada, he says, he somehow persuaded an air vice marshal to let him go home on the basis that he didn’t want to be trained to kill people. He later gave up work as an art director at the ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather, to become a freelance photographer, concentrating on plants. His guiding philosophy has always been: “If it’s not fun, don’t do it.” That spirit has taken him all over the world – adventures in wild food that are celebrated in his latest book, The Worldwide Forager. The milk means that there’s no need to add cream of any stripe to the finished dish, though it looks so pleasing against the green of the finished dish that you might like to anyway. Or pop in some stale bread fried in leftover bacon fat, as White recommends. Thrifty, warming and delicious: what more could you ask for at this time of year? Perfect nettle soup Will not identify your mushroom to species level – you will require an identification guidebook to complete this process (see below)

Phillips, Roger, and Jacqui Hurst. 1983. Wild food: [a unique photographic guide to finding, cooking and eating wild plants, mushrooms and seaweed]. London: Pan Books. In 1970 he met the book designer David Larkin, for whom he did numerous book covers. It was Larkin who signed him up to publish his Wild Flowers of Britain (1977) with Pan/Macmillan.Excellent, clear, full-colour, close-up photographs of mushrooms – often in various stages of growth and from various angles/sections In 1975 Roger Phillips began his life’s major work of photographing and publishing pictures of the World’s garden plants. Using modern photographic techniques, Roger set out to develop an encyclopedic collection of books to show the difference between plants as diverse as mosses, roses and annuals. His first book Wild Flowers of Britain was a huge success, selling 400,000 copies in the first year. He has since written 20 additional volumes (often with his co-author Martyn Rix) selling over 4.5million copies worldwide. Note that the book measures 8.5 by 11.5 inches so that the glossy photos are large enough to be easily appreciated.