Happy June, food & foraging friends!
Everything grows on the rugged little island of Madeira. The subtropical island – part of an largely uninhabited archipelago – is just 34 miles long and 621 miles from mainland Portugal, yet feels a world apart. 40 million-year-old laurel forests, mini-banana plantations and vineyards thriving on steep hillsides, and the offspring of seemingly every seed the wind ever carried here across the Atlantic.
When I say Madeira is rugged, I’m talking some of the steepest roads in the world (gradients of up to 45%), blasted from volcanic rock. I ditched my manual transmission rental after 36 hours of panicked attempts at three-point mountain turns, stalling out on skinny roads with skimpy guardrails after one GPS fail too many. I instead paid handsomely and happily to enjoy the scenery from the passenger side of a cab. At nearly every winding turn, I saw plants growing wild on the hills that many gardeners would delight in showing up uninvited, edibles like nasturtium, fennel, parsley, and oregano as well as pretty but poisonous ornamentals like poinsettia and foxglove, all enjoying Madeira’s median year-round temperature of 68 degrees.
Humans are a relatively recent arrival to Madeira– the first being a trio of Portuguese sailors in 1419, after which the island became an important pit stop between Europe and more distant trading posts. While no large mammals inhabited the island before the bipeds, plant life had been flourishing here for millions of years. Of Madeira’s 780 species of native plants, 150 are unique to the island, including the Pride of Madeira, a showy blue flower dotting the hillsides.
Joining a jeep excursion, I visited Madeira’s prehistoric laurisilva (laurel) forest, where tree species thrive that on the European mainland are found only as fossils. A soon-to-be-released Star Wars movie was filmed in this otherworldly misty forest landscape, tinkling with the sounds of Madeiran chaffinches and cowbells. These forests preserve a huge wealth of biodiversity and unique ecological niches, as well as seasoning for local dishes! Laurel (aka bay) leaves are used to flavor the Madeiran espetada (grilled meat on skewers traditionally made from laurel wood and cooked over grape wood embers). These days most restaurants use metal skewers that are easier to hang across tables from wires like clotheslines.
Left/top: Wild nasturtium and parsley are among the many herbs growing wild on Madeira. Limpets, a native shellfish, are a favorite Madeiran delicacy, along with local ferments from cherries, grapes and blueberries.
Right/bottom: Banana passionfruit also grows wild in the Madeiran hills, spreading like wildfire to the delight of bees turning its saccharine nectar into honey. Its fruit is not so sweet.
Journeying up a rocky track accessible only by 4×4, our driver stopped and climbed into the brush and came out with hands full of giant cotton candy-pink flowers with bulging bottoms, which we were instructed to tap like smokers with cigarette packs to gather the nectar. Splitting the flower stems open, a heaping teaspoon of sweetness spilled out on our palms, which we greedily licked up.
Behold the banana passionfruit flower! I felt guilty about stealing the nectar from the bees, until I learned the plant, a South American native, is actually a super-spreader that can strangle trees. The fruit, shaped like a little grenade, was sour and seedy like a regular passionfruit, but with a citrusy twist. Passionfruit also grows on Madeira, and is used in a sauce for the local black scabbardfish, served with cooked banana.
The next day, I made my way to island’s west end, making a stop at a little town called Prazeres, where church ladies run a quirky petting zoo and gardens and make cottage food products. A few local construction workers were having an afternoon nip at the quinta’s “tea house,” and invited me to a round of a delectable sweet liqueur made from a native red-stemmed blueberry (vaccinium padifolium). I sampled the other local drink of choice, a hot hard cider with laurel honey, fennel fronds, lemon zest and cinnamon stick. Both drinks went down easy… way too easy.
Another local, new-to-me delicacy, foraged from the sea (though not by me): limpets! Called lapas in Portuguese, limpets are small sea snails with cone-shaped shells. These scrumptious tidbits came served in a black skillet sizzling with garlic and olive oil, their shells covered with slimy algae – the limpet’s main food source! Fun fact: their microscopic teeth, used to scrape food off rocks, are the strongest biological material ever tested.
I had one day in Lisbon before flying home, where, on a sailboat on the Tagus River, I got a tip for a local wild purslane soup featuring “half aged” goat cheese. I just saw purslane sprouting on the fringes of my community garden, so I’ll be giving that a try.
See you in July – when I’ll have a report from Newfoundland!
Wildly yours,
April