Eating down by the river
Ella Walker tries her hand at cooking and consuming the River Cottage way
Ithought they were joking: panna cotta made with seaweed? Surely River Cottage’s head forager John Wright’s in cahoots with head chef Gill Meller? Setting a room of novices - which includes me - up for a fall come the end of lunch, when we’d all have to dish up a salty sludge of sea green cream to celebrity chef Hugh FearnleyWhittingstall.
Either that or we’re actually about to make two dishes, and they’d just jumbled up all the ingredients.
But no - it turns out, as I discover by the end of the day, you really can use stewed, smooshed fronds of seaweed, strained through muslin, as a gelatin alternative to set a creamy panna cotta.
It’s one of many interesting facts I glean during a foggy morning spent cooking, foraging and eating at River Cottage HQ, a picturesque farm and cookery school wedged in a valley on the Dorset-Devon border.
A rickety tractor ride takes us down to meet the River Cottage team, a group of food writers, experts and teachers, led by FearnleyWhittingstall, who have put together a grand new book, River Cottage A To Z, an opus containing more than 350 recipes, dedicated to their favourite ingredients - and it’s huge; the definition of a doorstopper, one that requires not insignificant bicep muscles to heft.
The book is a stunner, but it’s easy to become distracted when you’ve been shepherded into a yurt and are being plied with still warm tahini flatbreads and split pea hummus around a fire.
You certainly don’t go hungry at River Cottage.
Bellies almost full, Wright takes us on a tour of the grounds and kitchen garden, guiding us as we forage for herbs to flavour our desserts, knocking down sprays of musky elderflower with a staff when we can’t reach, telling us to get our noses into plants like lemon verbena and lavender, and to sniff scrunched up currant leaves.
He even wades into a stream to pluck water mint leaves, and provides a running commentary on foraging misconceptions (“Don’t confuse elderflower with fool’s parsley, unless you want cordial tasting of cat wee”), recipe ideas (“Gooseberry fool is always a winner”) and drinking tips - his home-made grass vodka is particularly pungent when sipped at 11am on a Thursday, and smells very much like a horse stable. Thankfully, the vodka doesn’t knock my cookery skills too much, as lunch - two courses prepared by the River Cottage chefs (little gem and broad bean salad, followed by fragrant pork belly with noodles), and then dessert by me and my fellow novices - is still to go.
This may all sound daunting - and certainly, you are bombarded by incredible amounts of knowledge and skill when encountering River Cottage, whether through its back catalogue of TV shows and books, or its hands-on cookery courses, but somehow it doesn’t overwhelm. Perhaps it’s the sheer amount of enthusiasm that drives the place, which means that while putting seaweed in a pudding might be bamboozling at first, by the time you’re whisking it into shape and sticking it in the freezer, everything makes total, straightforward sense.