Nettle Soup and Whortleberry Wonder

When you start packing to move house you find all sorts of things you didn’t know you had. This collection of Exmoor recipes resulted from a competition held in 1986. I think my mother gave it to us, as a curiosity perhaps rather than in the expectation that we would cook any of the recipes. There is a lot of venison and rabbit, and one recipe for ‘Poacher’s Pockets’ in which the ingredients include ‘8oz venison, one rabbit and three pigeons’. One of the recipes that won a prize was for Nettle Soup; for the best young nettles you had to go to Dunkery Beacon, the highest point on Exmoor. There are also recipes for whortleberry desserts like 'Whortleberry Wonder'. Whortleberries grow wild on the moor but I would be surprised to find them in a shop. So I think this cookery book was intended for feeding the imagination rather than for cooking.