The secret appeal of scurvy grass

A delicate brassica that even its mother would struggle to call pretty, the sea kale can compete with asparagus for the title of ‘taste of spring’, reveals Tom Parker Bowles

- Tom Parker Bowles

SOMETIMES, elegance can be found in the most incongruous of places. Take the sea kale, a wild brassica that even its mother would be pushed to describe as pretty. Scattered across the beach in great unruly clumps, among the ‘bayches and brimmes of the sea, where is no earth to be seen, but sande and rolling pebble stones’, in the words of that great herbalist John Gerard, it has coarse, glaucous leaves and broad, fleshy stems. Imagine a cabbage on steroids or an explosion of kale. If you were brave enough to take a bite, the taste buds would recoil, bombarded by an excess of bitter.

But look closer and you may find sand and pebbles piled up at its base, the work of a wily forager or an in-the-know local. The aim being to protect the young white stems from the sun, to force and blanch them, making them sweet and tender, the first taste of British spring. Naturalist John Wright, in his splendid book The Forager’s Calendar, recommends locating the young plant in February, recognisable ‘by a few flower spikes from last season’, then gently scraping back the pebbles to reveal the roots, replacing the stones and adding more, to form a ‘broad mound about 20cm [8in] high’. A month or so later, you return to harvest your bounty. It’s important to remember where your mounds are, he warns, and although a small flag would work best, ‘this merely invites inspection by the unscrupulous and probable loss of your prize’.