The chef’s new salad leaves? Weeds

Forget romesco dressing, butterhead lettuce and hispi cabbage. The hottest salad to serve on the side at your next dinner party or to order in a restaurant is a plate of weed. Not the illegal kind, but the weeds you find growing in your garden.

The UK is in the midst of a foraging frenzy. Middle-class cooks up and down the country are scrambling to get the last of the wild garlic, and the arrival of spring means nettles are sprouting up in gardens and on restaurant menus in soups and salads. At Celentano’s cocktail bar in Glasgow foraged cherry blossom is pickled and used in martinis and daiquiris. This month the award-winning hyper-eco restaurant Native moves into its new site on the Netherwood Estate in Herefordshire and will employ a team of foragers to pick nasturtium flowers and hay for the menu. Using ingredients you find in your local field rather than the supermarket is cool.

Some restaurants are taking foraging up a notch. The event foodies are talking about is a monthly feast in a greenhouse at Worton Kitchen Garden in Oxfordshire. On the menu for May? Weeds.

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Worton isn’t like its pristine, perfectly kept neighbours in the Cotswolds. It’s a real farm — the full oink. On its eight acres, roamed by chickens, pigs, guinea fowl, geese and turkeys, the head chef and owner Simon Spence takes a regenerative approach to farming, prioritising soil diversity and shying away from pesticides and weeding. Which means that when I arrive one Friday afternoon things are a bit less perfect and a bit more messy.

It couldn’t be further from Soho Farmhouse, which is 30 minutes up the road and isn’t, let’s face it, much of a farm. “Our approach means things look a bit more unkempt. We’re unique, but that’s a key part of why people like us,” Spence explains. Princess Beatrice and her husband, Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, live down the road, and her mother has visited Worton. “We’re not too precious about the details,” Spence adds. “It makes people feel more relaxed and better about their backyard.”

It means that there are weeds everywhere: nettles, dandelions and chickweed — plants that most of us would pull out or trample over. But what you might see as a garden pest Spence sees as an ingredient. One of the most popular dishes on the supper club menu is the Weeds from the Yard side salad.

I am visiting in the early throes of spring. We are surrounded by blankets of daffodils, and in the glasshouses dotted around the farm are thousands of tulips. Spence leads me on a tour, pointing out the weeds and what he’d do with them. Ground elder, for example, is an invasive weed that drives gardeners to distraction. But it was brought to Britain by the Romans as food for troops, Spence tells me. “It’s delicious if you treat it as spinach and cream it or mix it with ricotta for a ravioli,” he says. “The flavour is sweet like parsley.”

He boils a large bunch of ground elder, stems removed and leaves washed, drains it and squeezes the liquid out. Then he melts a large knob of butter, adds chopped shallots and cooks them for a few minutes before adding a tablespoon of flour and a glug of pastis. Finally he pours in 100ml cream and stirs through the chopped ground elder. “You want to make sure you get the younger leaves in the spring, so it’s the perfect time to pick right now.”

Spence points out alexanders, another weed of spring and early summer. “It is often found in dry, sandy, coastal soils, but it grows everywhere in gardens and parks. It’s a real pest where it’s happy, but it’s delicious. Boil the shoots and serve them with asparagus.” Then there is yarrow, which can be found in most lawns. “It’s a good contrast in salads,” Spence says.

The weed we all recognise is the nettle. Spence suggests putting on gloves and picking the youngest plants for soup. Boil them, drain and squeeze out as much water as possible, then melt a knob of butter in a pan and add chopped onions, garlic, salt and pepper. Pour in 800ml 50/50 vegetable stock and milk, whisking until you have the consistency of cream. Add the nettles and blend with a stick blender until smooth.

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Lovage was once a much sought-after herb, but is now largely ignored as a weed. “It has a mild celery flavour,” Spence says. “The Italians have convinced us that basil is the best accompaniment for tomatoes, but I would say lovage has the best flavour.”

I’m always sceptical about this foraging malarkey. When someone tells me that a shrub I can pick on my commute would be a great substitute to a foolproof herb such as basil I tend to scoff. Dress anything with lots of olive oil and serve it with a pot of sauce or a plate of juicy meat and I’m not going to say no. Besides, as much faith as I have in Spence’s garden to produce a delicious meal, I’m not quite as confident in my local park in southeast London. But eating at Worton is a lesson in what we are overlooking in our gardens. The supper club menu featured labneh crostini served with wild hops, stinging nettle soup, and a crayfish, sorrel and wild watercress cocktail as starters, with wild rabbit and marjoram, an undershrub with lemony notes, served with a plate of Spence’s side salad for the main.

“We’ve demonised weeds — even the name we’ve given them,” he says. “But a few generations ago people would have had all this knowledge. We’d have looked at the things growing around us with a totally different lens and with a different appreciation.”

I won’t quite be foraging for my supper on my walk home, but when the supermarket comes up short I may take a detour via my local park to see what’s growing.