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.