Food - If you see someone bent over with their bottom up, they must be foraging

Dandelion season again. How I miss my dead friend Claude, who used to come and pick the young dandelion leaves in my garden for his rabbits. Real gourmets scorn wasting them on rabbits, and eat them instead as part of a tender salad. In Italy, people harvest mixed wild herbs and use them for all kinds of dishes. The mixture traditionally includes wild borage, lovage, dog's tooth, sorrel, chicory, onion and chervil. In Genoa, this bouquet - called preboggion - mixed with spinach, ricotta and parmesan, is used to stuff triangular pasta pockets; these are served with a sauce of walnuts ground and mashed with bread, sour milk and oil. The Turks make a remarkably similar sauce from walnuts named tarator; perhaps Turkish travellers brought it to Genoa in the early Middle Ages, when so many Middle Eastern dishes arrived in the west.

You can buy preboggion in the markets, or pick the herbs yourself. Foraging simply requires patience and knowledge. In London's Mile End, my friend Stephen finds wild fennel and garlic, and plucks elderflowers for bottling with cider vinegar. Recently, walking along the canal into town from the East End, Stephen spotted an old Turkish woman, bent over, bottom up, the characteristic stance of foragers everywhere, and went to see what she was picking. Wild parsley. Stephen speaks no Turkish, the old woman spoke no English, but they managed to convey their enthusiasm by gesture.

As with so much of our food heritage, we have had to rediscover fresh herbs. Remember sage - that powdered grey stuff sold in packets for turkey stuffing? When I inherited large sage bushes in my French garden, I had to learn how to use these delicious, faintly bitter leaves. Now I do as the Italians do: saute them in butter to serve on veal, or ravioli. Dipped in batter and then deep-fried, they are good with aperitifs, or as an hors d'oeuvre. Rosemary, fried with potato cubes or as part of a simple pizza topped with charred red onion rings, has proved another revelation. I hate vinegary mint sauce, but I love mint with vegetables. Fry slices of courgette in olive oil until golden, strew with torn mint, and eat on pasta as a princely supper.

World cuisine and fusion cuisine mean choosing any herb you want; or else rocket with everything. Here in the Mayenne, all the charm of local dishes is retained. Yvette has not heard of rocket and refuses my proffered bunch. Eugene would not like it. Nor would he tolerate basil. When discussing with her the glut of over-wintered leeks I had harvested, I said: "Oh, I've got a huge bay tree. I'll make leeks a la grecque" - a dish I remember eating in bistros in London during the 1960s. "What's that?" Yvette asked. "A classic French dish," I replied. "Oh no, I don't think so," she replied, shaking her head.

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