Dreadful trade

Had some very nice Samphire with dinner last night, though to my eternal shame (as a supposed wild forager) it came from a supermarket, no doubt at great expense. Raw, it can be very salty, but boiled briefly or steamed and served with a knob of butter (unsalted) it's great.

My wife was trying to sell it to the kids as seaweed, though it is actually a true flowering plant. The flowers, though, are tiny; mere scales on the surface of the cylindrical fleshy stems. The seeds form inside, and when ripe the whole plant shrivels and breaks up into segments, each containing a seed, which are then washed away on the tide. This puts them in the charming category of 'propagules' - units of propagation - rather than true fruits. You can have that bit of useless information for free.

Our native Samphires are a complicated group belonging mostly to the genus Salicornia. They are all very similar, requiring an expert with a hand-lens to tell them apart, and they languish under the burden of names like Salicornia dolichostachya. Luckily for the wild food enthusiast they are all equally edible and pretty distinctive. The saltmarshes where they grow undergo a transformation at this time of year to rival our broadleaved woodlands, as the Samphires and their relatives turn red, purple and gold.

The title of this post, incidentally, comes from King Lear - 'Halfway down hangs one that gathers Samphire - dreadful trade'. That actually refers to another, unrelated, plant - Marsh Samphire. This member of the carrot family is more often found on rocks and cliffs than in saltmarsh, and was collected for the table at great personal risk to the collector, hence the 'dreadful trade'. It is just as edible as its namesakes, though with (not surprisingly) more of a carrot/celery flavour.