John Lewis-Stempel's Page

June is one of the best months in the wild food year, not least because the pignut is in season. An umbellifer, the pignut has a delicate feathery flower (a bit like miniature cow parsley) which pokes above the summer grass; the edible tuber lies underground at the end of a thin white root. Caliban, in Shakespeare's The Tempest, used his fingers to dig up the 'nuts', but a trowel or spade is infinitely easier to excavate them with. They are best eaten raw, after the earth has been scraped off; t… Continue