Foraging for Sea Truffles

In Which I Get Lessons in Gathering Ireland's Unofficial National Vegetable

// It's a strange thing about Ireland. Here's an island nation, with 7,000 kilometers of coastline, that came to rely products of the land—beef and butter, cabbage and Guinness, lumpers and coddle—rather than the bounty of the sea. My mother's forebears were forced to leave in the 1840s, at the time of the famine, because of people's over-dependance on that highly nutritious import from the Andes, the potato. Yet all around them were some of the North Atlantic's richest fishing grounds, and a corrugated shore studded with limpets, winkles, oysters, and whelks, and rimed with protein-rich algae.

Things have changed lately. Fish is no longer associated with fast days and penance, the rare visit to a seaside "chipper" (fish 'n' chip shop), or a Friday dinner of soggy Captain Birdseye fish fingers. In May I met the Michelin-starred chef J.P. McMahon at his restaurant Aniar (the name means "out of the west") in Galway, and there he extolled the virtues of Irish seafood and river and lake fish (eels, trout, salmon, and pollan, which is unique to Ireland), all of which he features on his tasting menus and in his scholarly The Irish Cook Book. When talk turned to seaweed, which he's called "the national vegetable of Ireland," his eyes began to twinkle. It was then he invited me into the kitchen, where he began to crack open a a large Tupperware library of algae and sea herbs.

There are at least 500 kinds of seaweed on Irish shores, about 15 of which are used for food. In his kitchen that day, McMahon had powdered sea truffle, which looked like finely-ground pepper; he sprinkled it over dishes with one of those snap-ball tea strainers.

There were Zip-loc bags of sea sandwort, and tubs of nori and pickled dillisk (Palmaria palmata, also known as dulse). Dillisk is particularly tasty; when it's dried, it makes a satisfying protein-rich snack food.

"It's high in magnesium and iron," McMahon told me. "Back in the day, before 1950, they sold bags of dillisk in Donegal and Waterford, and the lads would be chewing on a bit of dillisk while they were having a pint." (Before potato chips and Doritos, seaweed was also a popular snack in Newfoundland.) He cited the research of an archaeologist named Michael Gibbon. "He found that, before the coming of the potato, coastal communities would have farmed seaweed. It’s very simple: you just literally move all the rocks that the seaweed grows on into a line. And then you have your seaweed farm; each family would have had its own patch."

At the bustling English Market in the center of Cork, I sampled oysters and chewed on one of the great foraged treats of the British Isles, samphire. Some samphire is cultivated, but the tastiest, rock samphire, is gathered wild from the shore, on the high tideline (marsh samphire, which is saltier, grows inland). Rock samphire (Crithmum maritimum) is a striking bright green, glossy when wet, and bursts between the teeth with a satisfying snap. (It makes an appearance in Shakespeare's King Lear, which alludes to the risky act of harvesting: "Half-way down, Hangs one that gathers samphire; dreadful trade!") It is a staple on seafood plates in Britain, but alas, it doesn't grow on the shores of the New World. Pity!

I decided I needed a crash course in foraging for Irish seaweed. (My ancestors would definitely have benefited from the knowledge!) After listening to a podcast, I decided to track down Suzanne Burns, the founder of Kinsale Food Tours. Kinsale is a picturesque coastal community south of Cork; I met Burns at the end of a serpentine road, on a curved stretch of seawall a short swim from Sandycove Island. (Circumnavigating the island is part of the training routine of swimmers who brave the English Channel crossing. Burns had been swimming earlier that morning, though the water temperature was only 11 degrees C / 52 F.) The island is uninhabited, apart from its colony of goats—we could see their white coats dotted on the isle's furring of green grass—which Burns told me she's often seen munching on seaweed.

Burns is a zoologist, who spent a decade abroad, studying marine mammals in New Zealand, Australia, before specializing in humpback whales and orcas on Vancouver Island. We roamed the shore at a very slow pace, for every few steps she would come across another edible plant worthy of description. I'll let her speak for herself. I started by asking her about the mixed salad of seaweed we saw at the tideline. (In the photo below, the patch between the rocks.)

"That would be kelp, dillisk, bladderwrack, sea lettuce, and native carrageen. The dillisk was a major food source. It's like bacon, up to fifty percent protein. Women working in the fields would actually have like a little pouch of dried dillisk, and they would just be eating it through the day, with a baby on the back and they'd be working, chewing on these nutrient powerhouses. The structure of your day to day life then, before the famine, involved getting three things sorted. The potatoes. The children. And the seaweed."

I asked her why, if there was such a good protein source available, and fish were so widely available, so many people had starved during the Great Hunger.

"Not everyone lived by the coast, of course. In communities where seaweed and shellfish were available, the coastlines got stripped during the famine." (The famine wasn't a single event; it lasted for several years, and as the months ground on, many fishermen were forced to sell their boats.) "The good fishing grounds were out in deep water, and it's hard to row a currach that far if you're starving."

During our roaming, Burns gave me some advice about ethical foraging. "Don’t grab seaweed straight off the rock, pulling up a clump. You just snip off a little, using scissors. That can actually help them proliferate."

She directed me towards a picnic table, where she started unpacking our lunch from the trunk of our car.

"Seaweeds are a superfood. They’re way higher in vitamins and minerals than any land-based plant that you get. A lot of the green seaweeds, and the wracks I deal with grow in the intertidal zone. Which means they have superhuman abilities.

"They have inbuilt sunscreen and antifreeze, because you're spending half your days exposed to the wind and the sun and the air and the predators. And then half their day actually been covered, say every six hours. They're really bad asses."

And Irish seaweed is the stuff to eat: the waters around the island are clean and cold, exactly the kind of environment you want your wild food to come from.

By then, I was pretty hungry—the sea air will do that to you. Fortunately Burns had set out a true feast. We began with a sip of tea from a thermos, made from an infusion of herb robert and nettles.

Alas, the timing was bad for sampling sea truffles, which are also known as pepper dillisk; they are best gathered in the winter. (This is one of the great Irish delicacies; I did have a chance to try it dried at Wa Sushi, a Japanese restaurant in Galway, and even in that form it was memorable, straddling that interesting zone between pungent and disgusting. Like asafoetida, which I wrote about here, it's easy to cross a line that makes it overwhelm the palate, lingering in your tissues for hours).

Here's the picnic feast Burns laid out:

The bat-wing like algae on the left is nori; on the far right you see "sea spaghetti," known as ríseach in Irish (Himanthalia elongata). There was kelp, and carrageen moss (which makes a good pudding), and bladderwrack. Did we eat them like this, slimy and out of the sea? Hell no. They all require some processing—drying at the very least, and hard boiling in many cases. Fortunately, Burns had come prepared, and I got to enjoy a delicious cheese called Carrigaline Farmhouse, made with dillisk seaweed (below).

But the stand-out was dessert: two pieces of dried sugar kelp (the upper part of the photo below) that had been drizzled with dark chocolate, from the chocolatier Koko Kinsale. This was astonishing: chewy and sweet, the sugar kelp performed like salted caramel in a high-cacao Belgian chocolate.

I could go on, but I should probably wrap up here. Suffice it to say, seaweed and shellfish are far from bia bocht, once a derogatory Irish term for "food of the poor." They are rich in flavour, and my potat0-addicted ancestors would have definitely benefited from a more thorough understanding of their nutritional qualities.

I've written more about my foraging adventures in Quebec in this dispatch (oddly enough, led by another woman from Ireland). If you happen to be in Ireland, I highly recommend booking a coastal foraging tour with Kinsale Food Tours, who also do walking tours of the lovely town of Kinsale. And don't forget to pack some seaweed in your bags when you leave; it's a way to sprinkle a bit of Irish intensity into your meals for months to come.