Field Blewit: The King of Autumn Mushrooms

As summer moves on into Autumn the late-summer foraging of fruit and greens recedes into more of a specialised mushrooming time. Yeah, there are some apples left on the trees, but the blackberries are way past their best now and we've enough greens on the allotment and in the garden such that we don't need to be gathering them wild right now. 

And as we move on into Autumn the kind of mushrooms we find changes too - in a typical suburb we get fewer Boletus and Suillus, and the assorted Agaricus and the like slowly tail off. By October, providing we've had enough rain to make the ground soggy on occasion, my main mushroom of choice is the blewit.

Specifically, I mean the field blewit, Lepista saeva. This one here...

This mushroom is, just sometimes, rudiculously plentiful in the UK. I've found it from the Scottish borders down to the South Coast. And in my opinion it is one of the finest wild mushrooms we have - its got an intense flavour, a meaty texture, its filling, and it is easy to identify.

Mostly it grows in rings, on grass, and its one of the many organic matter degraders that isn't just tolerant of mowing but seems to thrive where grass clippings are continuously reapplied to the ground. And as we mow the grass progressively less as the days get shorter and cooler, you can often find great rings of it after rain from late September onwards. Sometimes you find it frozen in place in December, no worse off for it.

Its ridiculously easy to identify. The cap is smooth, sort of buttery and brown, and the underside has quite crowded gills that make a pink spore print if you need to do so. They aren't quite attached to the stem, and they're pale brown with maybe a touch of pinkishness sometimes. The stem is fibrous and has a purple tinge to it, which is a giveaway. And the smell is floral-mushroomy, intense and pleasant.

Here's a closer look at one...

There are a couple of rather more purple Cortinarius species you could maybe mistake for it, if you were an idiot, but it would be hard. This really is one of the easiest shrooms to ID. 

It has a long history of use wherever it grows, which is why it has so many common names. Bluey, blue leg, bluebutton etc. all referring to the distinctive purple stem. It is especially popular in the East Midlands, and I've seen crates of it for sale in greengrocers in Nottingham, Beeston and Long Eaton. I was once stopped by a copper in Nottingham who wanted to know what I was doing under the trees in a park with a knife in my hand, and when I showed him what I was picking he was delighted to relate how his mum used to cook 'blueys' for him as a kid.

The only down-side to blewits is that they've a tendency to get water-logged. They soak up water like a sponge, which you need to be aware of when cooking them. Maybe you'll need to cook them a bit longer to get the water out of them if you need them drier in a dish, or just add less wine or stock in a stew.

The ways of cooking it are many and varied, and I don't intend to bore you with loads of recipes needlessly repeating what you can find elsewhere. So I'll restrict myself to a few ideas that might wet your appetite.

BlewBird Stew

1 pigeon (or partridge, or half a pheasant) per person

Enough field blewits to cover the top of the stew pot

Stock (chicken or game)

Red Wine

Onion, carrot, celery

Garlic

About a dessertspoon full of juniper berries

Salt, pepper, flour

Chop a couple of celery sticks, an onion, and a carrot fine and brown them slowly in a stew pot. Take them out, and coat the birds in well seasoned flour. Brown them in the same pan, add in enough wine and stock to half cover them and put the sauteed veg and crushed garlic clove back in. Squash the juniper berries and drop them in, along with the mushrooms. Bring it to the boil and pop it in the oven for about an hour at 180C, turning the birds over half way through. Serve it with mashed spuds and steamed greens, its a delicious seasonal stew.

Blewit Pate

Blewitts

Garlic

Parsley

Salt and pepper

Cream cheese

This recipe makes the most of the intense flavour of this mushroom. Chop the mushrooms, sautee them off with a bit of butter, and when they're cooked and starting to dry up just a but add in the garlic and parsley, just until they're soft. Season with salt and pepper and let it cool down.

Put the cooked shrooms with a scoop of cream cheese (Philadephia is fine) in a blender, and zuzz them about until they're a pate consistency. Taste and season further if you need to, flatten it in a dish, and chill it until its set. Serve it with crackers or toast.

Blewits and Pasta

Blewits

Onion

Flour

Milk

Salt and pepper

Parsley

Pasta

This is based on the traditional way of cooking blewits in Nottingham, but I think its a bit better to serve with pasta than with mashed potato.

Chop and sautee the blewit stems with a chopped onion. Mix in a couple of spoons of flour, and slowly add milk to form a thick sauce. Season with salt and pepper, and handfull of chopped parsley, and add the mushroom caps (sliced) and cook for ten minutes or so. Keep it on the heat until the flour is fully cooked out. Mix it in with cooked pasta, and serve. 

If you were doing this in Nottingham in the 1930s you'd serve it in a well in the middle of a plate of mashed spuds, and you'd have cooked it for an hour. I like it a little less over-cooked, and seasoned with lots of pepper, tossed into pasta.

The Suburban Peasants Guide to Road Kill

Foragers tend to be good at finding fruit, vegetables, nuts and mushrooms. Those lucky enough to live close to the sea can supplement that with shell-fish (and sea-weed), but if you don't then the best animal protein you can find is usually the form of garden snails - a tasty (but fiddly) morsel that isn't to everyone's taste. There's another option though.

The thing about the Suburbs is they're almost, but not quite, out of town. And that means that when you get out on your bike or in a car, you'll very often be out on rural roads very quickly - which means you've opportunity to obtain a heck of a lot of free protein.

You've most likely taken on a demeanor of disgust now. The idea of scraping a dead animal up off the road and eating it sounds, well, gross. So your nose has wrinkled up and your eyes narrowed, the classic defence we all have against things we think may make us ill. But I think, unless you don't like meat, you should reconsider.

Ok. I'm Listening. Why Would I Eat Road Kill?

With a good eye, and just a few precautions, you can glean a free meal from a creature that has quite needlessly died. It has probably lived a better life than a farmed animal, and its otherwise going to go to waste. We've lots of wild game (and tasty vermin) in the UK, and it is typically very healthy, low fat, versatile meat. But it can be strangely awkward to source - few supermarkets even have fresh rabbit or pheasant these days, so you'll have to go to a butcher, farmers market or game dealer. You are, literally, going right past a tasty dinner that is going to go to waste - why would you eat it is the wrong question. Why wouldn't you eat it? Its low impact, free, tasty, healthy food. 

What Kind of Meat do you Get?

We're mowing down animals by the thousand on our roads - but that doesn't mean they're all likely to be tasty. Its sadly rare for a rabbit or a squirrel to be in a useful state after a road accident. It'll probably be a furry, blood-stained pan-cake. Most commonly what I get from the roadside is pheasant or pigeon - they're often hit by car bumpers rather than tires, so they're usually intact and in good condition. But I've had the occasional rabbit and squirrel where they've had a bang on the head from a passing car, and while my own bike rides don't usually take me anywhere I'll find a deer, there are a heck of a lot them killed on the roads - but a deer is rather more difficult to handle, for various reasons I'll mention later.

OK. I've got out of the car/off the bike to look at a dead animal. Now what?

Firstly, have a look to see how intact it is. A rabbit with a tire track down the middle of it isn't much use to you. But if there isn't much exterior damage, if it looks more or less intact, then you're off to a good start.

Turn it over to see that its intact on the other side - use a stick if you like. You might well find its full of maggots at that point, but it may not me. If it still seems intact at this point, pick it up and have a feel. If its still warm (like, body temperature warm) then its obviously fresh. If its got rigor mortis then its not very old (hours), that's a good sign too. Inspect the rear end and the front end to make sure its not all mangled (you don't want the goop from top or bottom infecting the meat), and take a deep-lung full of clean air topped off with a tentative sniff of your potential meal at the end. Does it smell like an animal rather than a rotting carcass? If it smells ok and has passed your visual examination, you're good to go. This advice works for rabbit, pheasant, pigeon, partridge... Most of the smaller animals you see. If you think you might see a deer, you need to do a but more reading. The word you're looking to google is 'gralloching' - if you think you can do that, and you think the carcass is in a good enough state such that this will still be relevant, then have a go. Venison can taint very badly if the guts are damaged, you need to take a bit more care (and do a little more reading) if road-kill deer are your quarry.

Right, I've taken this damn thing home, now what?

People have an odd idea that game should be hung for weeks on end, and it simply isn't true. Rabbit and pheasant are rarely hung for long. and hare is only really hung for a few days. Don't feel an urge to hang the animal for days, just until you're ready to process it (and at least until rigor-mortis has worn off). You'll find no end of information for how to process basically any wild meat, and once you've got it home you've plenty of time to consider how you're going to do this part.

In brief, its meat. Pheasant roasts well, or stews magnificently. Pigeon breast is amazing fried hot and fast and served bloody. Rabbit oughtn't need any introduction but has sadly fallen out of favour - can I suggest portioning it and deep frying it like chicken, or currying it. Its as versatile as chicken and even tastier.

So next time you're out for a nice ride out on country roads, keep your eyes open for freeby dinner.