Roger Phillips is Britain’s most celebrated mushroom-hunter, but it’s winter, so we restrict our lunchtime foraging to Borough Market by London Bridge. Phillips, a spirited man of 87, has walked downriver from his home in Pimlico to meet me at Turnips, the oldest speciality greengrocer at the market. He is a fan of its sideline in chanterelle and spelt stew, cooked in huge paella pans. We order a couple of steaming bowls of the thick mushroom dish – on a good day they sell 1,400 such bowls, each topped with a piece of parmesan crisp – and stand eating them on the cobblestones. Phillips is wearing a red and white spotted toadstool beret.
The staff of Turnip Kitchen greet Phillips as something of a prophet, mycologist royalty; new recruits are given his book on mushrooms as their bible. That pioneering volume, first published in 1981 – with its vivid description and photographs of hundreds of varieties and stages of growth – has enabled two generations of foragers to pick and eat with confidence.
Phillips accepts their compliments modestly while polishing off his stew – a dish I feel I could eat every winter lunchtime and never tire of. There is some discussion of the origin of the chanterelles – Portugal at this time of year – and we then wander to the edge of the market to get a glass of wine and sit and talk about the mulchy beginnings of his first love.
In the summer of 1940, with the blitz threatened, Phillips was sent away from his parents’ home in Uxbridge out to his grandparents’ dairy farm in Hertfordshire. “It just so happened that it must have been a marvellous mushrooming year,” he recalls. “Aged seven or eight I would go out into the fields with these steel milking buckets and bring them back brimful of mushrooms. They grow around cow pats, of course. That was the start of it. My grandmother would cook them up and they sent a few buckets to market. I’d get half a crown or something for each one.”
The thrill of those days has never left him. I guess a first question with any mushroom hunter is about hallucinogens but Phillips insists he has never had any interest in the “magic” side of his vocation. “It’s like when I worked in advertising in the 60s, people never used to bother to pass me a joint because they knew I didn’t need it.” He got all the highs he wanted simply by being in nature, tramping in woods, cooking outside, looking and learning. He wonders if it was genetic. “My father was an accountant. I imagine his daily life was bloody boring; but he absolutely loved going out blackberrying or whatever. That was total bliss to him – and to me.”
Phillips published books about trees and ferns and wild flowers before he got to mushrooms. He didn’t think the publisher at Pan would go for it. The British, he suggests, had always been funny about fungi. While across Europe and beyond natives would be out in fields and forests as if on pilgrimage in mushroom season, in the UK there was no tradition. “We were famous for herbs from medieval times, of course,” says Phillips. “But those books tend to refer to mushrooms as ‘the spit of Jesus’ or ‘the fruit of the devil’. Because they grew up from nowhere overnight they were associated with witchcraft.”
Those attitudes went surprisingly deep. When he was researching his first mushroom book Phillips was up in Scotland staying on a farm. The farmer was a “tight sod, who charged you extra for hot water and all that”. Phillips was out every day collecting chanterelles. One evening he told the farmer: “You have millions of these in your woods. Put them in a box and send them to France and you will make a small fortune.” The farmer looked at him and said simply: “People shouldnae eat that shite.” “And that was it. That idea was common.”
Phillips’s evangelising has done much to shift those superstitions. His original book has sold 750,000 copies. Each year he joins the musician and DJ Cerys Matthews at her Good Life Experience festival in north Wales and takes a few hundred people out into the woods. They cook up all the edible stuff they find over a fire pit. It takes him back to when his kids were growing up and they would go out nearly every weekend, rain or snow, collecting wild food. “It began when I worried that my son was growing up a townie,” Phillips recalls. “We used to go out to a place near the Grand Union Canal, at Denham. Just set up camp, build a little fire. It sort of took off. He would bring his pals and their parents would come. It was rather wonderful.”
Phillips has been a natural nonconformist. Three months into his national service in the RAF in Canada, he says, he somehow persuaded an air vice marshal to let him go home on the basis that he didn’t want to be trained to kill people. He later gave up work as an art director at the ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather, to become a freelance photographer, concentrating on plants. His guiding philosophy has always been: “If it’s not fun, don’t do it.” That spirit has taken him all over the world – adventures in wild food that are celebrated in his latest book, The Worldwide Forager.
The book grew out of his understanding of the propagation of knowledge: “We don’t need governments to connect us, just space where it can happen,” he says at one point. He hopes the latest book is timely in that it looks beyond our borders. Highlights include his pilgrimage in search of the desert truffle with a Portuguese plant magus. “As far as I can make out the desert truffle is the manna referred to in the Bible,” he suggests. “And we went out and found this thing. Didn’t taste great, but it was incredibly exciting.”
He has learned a lot, too, from spending time with a Native American tribe, the Nez Perce, in Idaho, who retain some of the ancient knowledge of hunter-gatherers. Not only did Phillips increase his knowledge of edible tubers, he became friends with an eminently quotable chief: “How long will it take mankind to realise that you cannot eat money?”
I suggest that, like the hunter-gatherers, Phillips must see a different countryside to the rest of us when he goes for a walk in the woods; so much to eat for a start …
“I find that particularly at the seaside,” he says. “I always think: what a dreadful waste. Just about everything is edible, and we hardly eat any of it. The Japanese know a hundred things to do with seaweed. I have no idea why we do not.”
Despite all the changes he has witnessed at first hand as a result of factory farming, he remains an optimist. He believes not only that we may see a necessary revival in sustainability, but that some of the more miraculous properties of fungi in particular might yet help us to fix the damage already done to the planet. “Fungi have been used to break down oil spills,” he says. “I think they will have a role to play in ridding the world of plastic.”
In the meantime, he follows Voltaire’s dictum of “tending his own garden”. In London this involves organising the planting and upkeep of the communal plot in Ecclestone Square where he lives; and also doing a bit of experimenting at a small cottage he owns in Wiltshire. He cooks and eats outside whenever he can; his last birthday meal involved – “bugger the neighbours” – a wood fire on the balcony of his flat.
And what about retirement, I ask, before he heads off back up river.
He shudders at the thought. “We are going to be dust long enough,” he says. And then he brightens. “According to a French mycologist there is a mushroom that grows only on the human brain, in graveyards. I suppose because they are uniquely nutritious.” He laughs at the idea. “I don’t know if it’s a comforting thought – but there it is.” OFM
The Worldwide Forager is published on 2 April (Unbound, £25). To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com
