Wild Booze Recipes

The blossoms and young leaves of flowering currant come right near the top of my early spring not-to-be-missed delicious list.

I’m pretty lazy when it comes to wild food recipes. Maximum deliciousness for minimum effort is the forager’s way. So here are some ideas on making small batch mead that require next to no equipment or effort and no added yeast – just what is floating around naturally…

Three of the finest liquids known to man go into this cocktail. Two of them are about the most labour-intensive liquids in the forager’s repertoire, so its quite an investment of precious resources…

There is something about alcoholic aniseed flavours that works wonderfully with sunshine – as witnessed by the popularity of drinks on the licorice-anise spectrum around the med: absinthe, ouzo, sambuca, anis…I could go on. So I figured why not use our indigenous (in the north of Britain anyway) sweet cicely (myrrhis oderata) to make a cocktail.

Really, such a delicious cocktail should have a more intriguing name. But when we tasted this, after 3 days foraging Islay in beautiful sunshine for the ingredients, its crisp aromatics just sung of the islands woods, marshes, hedgerows, moors and coast…