Free seafood know-how

Wild food expert Richard Mabey identifies and locates the best free shoreline delicacies.

A rich stew-pot of life
In his powerful book, Sea Change, Richard Girling calls the sea our civilisations's "amniotic fluid". It's a stunning and enlightening metaphor. The sea is where life began. It protects and nourishes our island culture. For all its problems it's still the richest stew-pot of life on the Earth.

And where the sea fingers, laps, crashes against earth, it changes the land's nature. It generates extraordinary, fluid ecosystems out of raw rock, whose seasons are twelve hours long and whose whole lives often last just a single year. If you're a romantic you won't be surprised that shorelines are bountiful places too, that the oceanic eau de vie has conjured up a benign and fascinating plant life, nourishing to body and soul alike. Shorelines, neither sea nor land, teach you that nature has no boundaries and no permanence, and an adaptability that we've largely forgotten. And that they're a cornucopia of delicacies, too.

 
Agreeable, succulent and tangy
The shoreline, the littoral - we called it "the Edge" up in north Norfolk - was where I learned the craft of foraging for wild food. I spent days up to my knees in glooping mud, gnawing my way through stalks that tasted like rusting iron hawsers, tagging onto the locals as they stalked the sea-banks with their baskets. I began to grasp that an entire strand of our food history had been based on the culture of foraging. To realise that to survive in these salt-drenched environments, plants had to preserve water inside themselves, and were mostly agreeably succulent and tangy. And to absorb the subtle, shifting ecology of these places, the difference between mudflat and muddy creek, between a pool in storm-wrecked shingle and a sandy lagoon.

This is the way to go foraging on the coast, not with some kind of Gastro-Beach Guide (all Britain's shorelines have much the same flora), but by acquiring the senses of a hunter-gatherer, learning the lie of this un-land, its contours and tidal rhythms. Start with the rim of the sea itself, as life did. Seaweeds are a rigorous introduction to unfamiliar tastebuds, but increasingly popular as Japanese cuisine becomes part of our experience. Pick young growths and try them all, raw. There are no poisonous seaweeds close to the shore, though some are inedibly tough, or with off-putting tastes. Try sea-lettuce, growing on stones close to the shore, and looking exactly like its name. Kelp, strap-like brownish fronds. Bladder-wrack, like strips of greenish bubble-wrap. Stir-fry them, if you can't take the raw texture. Or cook them for much longer into a kind of mush, as the Welsh do with laver.

 
The most delectable of wild vegetables
Further inland are the glistening, membranous mudflats and saltings, out of the water at low-tide. The first coloniser of this pioneer land is marsh samphire, the most delectable of wild vegetables, like a small, soft, spineless cactus. There are a dozen different species in Britain, and multitudes of varieties. I still can't botanically distinguish them, but I know where and when they grow: the thin straight stalks on the flats, the bushy types on the creek edges, the late season al dentes. They are all superb raw, or steamed and served with butter, when they resemble a jelly made of best broccoli tips. Samphire has had a rags-to-riches history. After the 1953 flood in East Anglia, a stem 6ft tall was found near a sewage outfall and carried off on a bicycle crossbar to be hung above a pub bar. Thirty years later, marsh samphire, gathered from the marshes on the Sandringham estate, was served at Charles and Diana's wedding breakfast.

 
Thunderously iron-rich cabbage
A little further inland, and up maybe 6 inches in altitude, you're onto permanent saltmarsh. Spot the drifts of tangy, silver-leaved sea-purslane, and the floppy purple-tinged shoots of seablite, both crunchy, iodized improvements on the idea of the side-salad. The high-tide line will have annual plants from sea-washed seeds (oraches, goosefoots) and maybe sea-kale, a huge-leaved and thunderously iron-rich cabbage whose edible parts are the stems. On dry shoreland - beyond the reach of all but the highest tides - there is sea-beet, looking exactly like cultivated spinaches (of which it is one of the ancestors) but infinitely fleshier and tangier. And two Roman introductions, fennel and alexanders, which seem to flourish in salty atmospheres. The trick with the angelica-flavoured, early-flowering, Mediterreanean alexanders is to blanch the young stems before cooking.

Life on the Edge is inherently cosmopolitan and opportunist. Respond to its disrespect for boundaries by keeping your own expectations open. I've found a prostrate apple tree, sprung from a discarded beach-party core, and producing precocious fruits dangling two inches above the shingle. And you might find a coconut, drifted here on the Gulf Stream from the Caribbean, the ultimate serendipitous sea-food.

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