Foraging trend can yield a rich bounty in P.E.I.
Tours offer chance to learn how to live off the land
It was late spring when I visited Prince Edward Island to explore the smallest Canadian province’s early culinary bounty. Although I have a pretty good idea of what’s in season around that time at home in Ontario — asparagus and radishes, mostly, plus some lettuces and the odd onion — I could only guess at what was sprouting on the Maritime island. The difference, though, was that while at home I can put together a list of seasonal ingredients I might find at the farmer’s market, as I prepared to travel to P.E.I., I was trying to figure out what kind of edibles I might find in the wild.
Foraging, that new culinary buzzword, brings the thrill of the hunt to those who can’t — or won’t — actually hunt. Indeed, with the rise of back-to-the-earth (the new nose-to-tail) restaurants like Rene Redzepi’s gamechanging Noma, everyone and their pooch is keen to live off the land a little, but identifying your woodland edibles is an acquired skill. Sure, we all know a wild strawberry when we see it, but mushrooms? Guesswork isn’t recommended — which is why, for instance, when my mom found what she thought were morels in her backyard before my trip out east, she was apprehensive about popping them straight in the skillet.
In P.E.I., Sylvain Cormier — a trapper since his teens — has been running Everything Wild, a foraging enterprise, for around two years. He spends about 300 days a year foraging — “This is my office,” he says on our excursion to a wooded area about 45 minutes outside of Charlottetown — and supplies many of his finds to Charlottetown’s top restaurants. If you want to learn about foraging on P.E.I., as I did, Sylvain is your guy.
Sylvain follows gentlemen’s rules when foraging — “You have to be kind of reverent about it,” he notes, adding that, generally, everyone is — which means that he takes only what he needs and leaves enough for others to find. The island is plentiful, though: On our brief excursion, we picked spruce tips (new, springtime growth on the fragrant conifers), tasted cattails (you may know them as bulrushes; their edible stalks range in taste from cool and cucumbery to sharp and peppery) and snapped photos of the area’s remaining fiddleheads which, it being late spring, were too few and far between to collect.
These days, Sylvain is picking everything from sea asparagus (a succulent that grows on beaches) to day lily pods, with his roster changing as the weather warms.
Oh, and good luck getting Sylvain — or anyone on P.E.I. who forages, for that matter — to lead you to mushrooms. They’re tough to locate and yield a far smaller bounty than, say, cattails. So once you find a good patch (which is to say, one that won’t make you sick), you keep it to yourself, and return to it indefinitely — and in secret.
Sylvain is licensed to forage, meaning he can sell what he finds, often out of an honour-system fridge he keeps on his front patio, stocked with cattails, preserves and his unparalleled smoked maple syrup. When I visited the fridge to pick up a jar of that very syrup on my last day in town, it was packed with various flora — heaping stalks of rhubarb, bright green handfuls of cress — that spoke not only to Sylvain’s skill as a forager, but to the camaraderie that binds Charlottetown’s small community of food purveyors and preparers: Walk up and help yourself — but only if you know something’s waiting for you!
In addition to foraging for wild fruit and veg (and tapping the occasional sugar maple), Sylvain is a fisherman, and on the night we joined him for a dinner at Terre Rouge — one of restaurants in Charlottetown that uses his foraged ingredients — he was gearing up for an all-nighter on his boat.
So much has the popularity of foraging risen in recent years that there are tourist packages in P.E.I. centred on living off the land, including local chef Ross Munro’s two-day surf-and-turf excursion and a weeklong farming and foraging retreat held by Shepherd’s Farm Organics, just outside of Charlottetown. But if formality isn’t your thing, there’s more to eat than meets the eye just about everywhere you turn: At Townshend Organics, a berry farm in Rollo Bay, we found wild watercress; later, at Eureka Garlic far ms, lamb’s lettuce could be pulled from between the bulbs.
When I returned from the island, I asked my mom about her mushroom find. She’d thrown them out, having determined them to be false morels — maybe. “They could have been the real thing,” she said. “But I just wasn’t sure.”
I couldn’t help but think that Sylvain would have been.