Book review: Wild and Sweet by Rachel Lambert

Rachel Lambert combines British seasonal foraging with sweet treats to create innovative flavours from the great outdoors

 

 

 

When thinking about dishes crafted from foraged ingredients, you’d be forgiven for immediately jumping to simple jams or knobbly mushrooms. But Rachel Lambert throws foraging preconceptions out the window with a cookbook filled with desserts that can be made throughout the year from seasonal UK vegetation. Lambert is a foraging expert based in Cornwall, who runs courses on the subject. This is her third book, following on from Seaweed Foraging in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, which won a Gourmand World Cookbook award in 2017.

 

 

 

There’s a handy guide to flavours for those who have no idea what to expect, as well as a chart for the yearly cycle of foraging to help you find ingredients at their best.

 

 

 

The book is divided into seasons and then sorted by each main ingredient, such as mint and elderflower in summer, and crab apple and blackberries in autumn. Lambert dives straight into the deep end with the first section, encompassing stinging nettles. Forget summer memories of roaming through the woods with prickly pain creeping up your legs – here is a recipe for nettle baklava, using a nettle and fennel-infused syrup. Dry your foraged leaves in a dehydrator or oven and it can be used to create a powder for nettle energy balls.

 

 

 

Less familiar names such as pineapple weed and cleaver seeds crop up later in the book, but handy pictures and descriptions to help you identify the right plant reveal what you may previously have dismissed as garden nuisances.

 

 

 

You will be surprised to be salivating at descriptions of gnarly looking weeds, such as the unfortunately-named hogweed seeds, described as “spicy, sweet, tingly and zesty”, which are used to make pumpkin and hogweed seed delights (a variation on Turkish delight).

 

 

 

In the book there are even a couple of alternatives to coffee for those who are trying to cut down on caffeine but still love a tiramisu – dandelion roots have a “chocolate fragrance and a mildly bitter aftertaste”, and once roasted and ground are the perfect replacement for your morning brew.

 

 

 

Wild and Sweet by Rachel Lambert (Hoxton Mini Press, £25)