Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Spectacular samphire
The crisp asparagus flavour of the marsh samphire now wins favour ahead of rock samphire, but it wasn’t always so, says John Wright
Once a much-derided (and frequently fraudulent) substitute for rock samphire in the eponymous Victorian pickle, marsh samphire gradually gained favour as a smart accompaniment to fish.
This all seems odd to me as, frankly, why one would wish to eat rock samphire in any form is a complete mystery. With a flavour of carrot and turpentine, it is horrible raw and even worse when pickled.
Marsh samphire, by contrast, has a mild asparagus flavour and is salty and wonderfully crisp. The fortunes of the two plants have reversed, with marsh samphire widely venerated and the likes of salmon, samphire and charred cucumber salad appearing on smart menus, while rock samphire is left to peaceful neglect.
There has long been a great confusion between these two plants, intended or not. An article in Tatler in 1957 maintained tradition by confusing the two so hopelessly that the reader was assured that marsh samphire grows in muddy estuaries (which it does) and also high up on cliffs (which it doesn’t), the latter domain being that of rock samphire.
The two plants are only distantly related as they are in different botanical orders. Marsh samphire is in the goosefoot family (along with spinach), while rock samphire is in the carrot family, hence the carroty flavour. There is also golden samphire in the daisy family, another plant of the seashore, but we have seen enough. Well, almost. One persistent misunderstanding about marsh samphire is that it is a seaweed. It is not a seaweed, not even a little bit.
Marsh samphire occurs all around the British Isles wherever there are shallow, estuarine conditions,
typically salt marsh. It could be in mud or mud mixed with shingle, and is sometimes found in brackish strips of land behind pebbly beach-mounds.
It is one of the few flowering plants that will tolerate being drowned in seawater twice a day. Great monoculture swathes are sometimes seen, looking like a coarse but beautifully neat lawn, but more often it is found mixed with other salt-tolerant plants such as annual seablite.
Confounding issues
I write of marsh samphire as though it were a single species, but half a dozen or more have been described from Britain. The commonest, and the one that is generally cultivated, is Salicornia europaea. This is a bright, light green. Other species may be red or yellowish and/or more bushy, but few people can reliably tell one from another. Even botanists fail to agree, with the great Clive Stace citing their “great phenotypic plasticity” as being one of several confounding issues.
Send a sample of the same plant to any three specialists and you will get three names back. For the forager, this is of no import as they all taste much the same. However, some species are rare and there is no easy way to be sure you are not helping yourself to the last patch of Salicornia wrightii in the kingdom.
All ‘true’ samphires are annuals, though a closely related genus, Sarcocornia, is represented in perennial samphire. This similarly edible, but fairly rare, plant is clearly a samphire but is easily distinguished by its sombre colours and perennial mat.
The informal gathering season is midsummer’s day until the end of August. Early in the season is best, before the central thread of the leaves becomes too troublesome. Samphires are unmistakable with their succulent, cylindrical, jointed and branching ‘leaves’. In their succulence, they are superficially similar to cacti and other succulents because they similarly need to conserve water.
On a rather gruelling two-day family excursion to the salt Sahara in Tunisia, I collected (and tasted) a plant that looked like a very large marsh samphire. A little research revealed it to be a related species, Salsola incanescens.
The flowers of marsh samphire are truly tiny, about the size of a pin-head.
The plant rarely grows much beyond 10cm tall but, in 2018, I went back to my old cockle-hunting haunt of Langstone Harbour in Hampshire. I walked a treacherous path among the ancient salterns to the north-west of Hayling Island and was presented with a vista of the tallest samphire I have ever encountered.
“You will encounter common species but it is easy to get over-excited and strip an area bare, with no seed for next year”
Many of them reached the heady heights of 25cm, some even taller. The sunny, drought conditions that year had stunted the growth of nearly every other wild plant, but samphire loves the sun, lives in the sea and the sea, of course, is always wet.
It is sad that diminishingly few of the trays of samphire found in British shops hail from native wild stock. Most is cultivated abroad, usually France and the Middle East. However, it is still collected commercially in Norfolk during its short season, most of it sold or used locally.
Be adventurous
So, if you want the home-grown stuff, you will need to collect it yourself. There are a few things to bear in mind. Do be careful how much you take and, especially, where you tread — nearly all long-term damage is down to footfall.
Mostly, you will encounter relatively common species but it is easy to get over excited and strip an area bare, with no seed for next year.
Secondly, it is illegal to uproot any plant without permission from the landowner, so you must use scissors. This makes little difference to an annual plant as it will seldom recover. But the law is the law, mad or not.
I once needed half a handful to illustrate a talk I was giving. Having forgotten my scissors, I attempted to remove just a small part but the entire plant came away in my hand. I was duly collared by a nature warden who had been keeping a suspicious eye on me and subjected me to a long lecture about my regrettable life choices.
If you manage to arrive home with your prize, just give your samphire a good rinse and be adventurous in how you use it.