How to go shrooming, by Antonio Carluccio
YOU’LL HAVE seen a lot of rain clouds recently, so you’ll know, as we do, that
they are huge, hanging, miserable things, black with depression and
spoilsportiness. But wait. In among them, we have found a single, gleaming
silver lining. Ready? Here it is: all the wet weather we’ve had dumped on us
means that this autumn should be a bumper mushroom season.
Wild mushrooms grow everywhere, they’re free and they’re out there now – the
trick is knowing which ones to pick. So we asked mushroom aficionado, author
and restaurateur Antonio Carluccio to pick his top five and tell us how to
cook them, and fungus expert Daniel Butler to explain what to look for and
where to find them. And, just so you don’t inadvertently pick one of the
50-odd poisonous varieties, he’s highlighted a guided walk for each one.
Happy hunting.
CEP (Boletus edulis) This is what most Europeans mean when they talk
about “wild mushrooms”. While some mycophiles may prefer the rare Amanita
caesarea or the morel, the cep (sometimes known as porcino, its Italian
name) remains the safest, tastiest and most rewarding of all wild mushrooms.
Since it is commercially collected and sold both fresh and dried, it is also
one of the most sought-after.
How to cook them: they’re great with waxy, firm potatoes, olive oil and sage.
Clean them up and slice thinly. Boil the potatoes, then cut into thicker
slices. Fry both separately with the oil and sage. Mix, season and serve
with meat or fish. Where to find them: common from late summer until
November in woods and along hedge bottoms, they are a brilliant beginner’s
mushroom, being both delicious and easy to identify. They have a brown cap,
a thick beige/cream stalk with distinctive spongy gills and firm, white
flesh that does not discolour. Drying improves the flavour, intensifying to
a positively nutty character.
Ceps are prevalent in the Forest of Dean, and there are forays on September
23, October 21 and November 4 (01594 833057).
CHANTERELLE (Cantharellus cibarius) This one has such a delicate aroma
of apricots and a wonderful golden-yellow colour. The French love them – in
fact, I’ve heard of many young lads who increase their pocket money by
collecting large quantities and sending them across the Channel. How to cook
them: the flavour works really well with red mullet. Marinate the fish
fillets in olive oil, lime juice, salt and pepper for two hours.
Fry a chopped shallot with the mushrooms, then pour in a dash of brandy. When
the alcohol has evaporated, add four tablespoons of cream, and salt, pepper
and parsley. Fry the fish fillets skin-side down for 5-8 minutes until the
skin is crisp and the flesh is cooked. Serve with the mushrooms on the side.
Where to find them: these golden-yellow flutes begin to appear in early
summer, flushing regularly from July to October after heavy showers.
They’re most common in Scotland, where they grow in virtually any type of
wood; in England and Wales, they are often associated with birch, chestnut,
hazel and beech. They thrive in the New Forest – try the Forestry
Commission’s Ringwood foray on October 13 (023 8028 3141). Don’t mistake
them for the inedible false chanterelle ( Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca), which
grows on rotting conifer roots and can be poisonous. If it smells of
apricots, you’re probably okay.
GIANT PUFFBALL ( Lycoperdon giganteum) Puffballs typically grow in open
fields – I even found one in the middle of Hyde Park once. Of the many
species of edible puffballs, the giant one is the most rewarding, as well as
the most distinctive: a prime specimen is enough to provide for the whole
family. Be sure the inside is firm and white before you cook it.
How to cook them: you can fry or steam puffballs, but grilling is simple and
effective. Cut the mushrooms into 2cm slices, mix with cep caps and coat in
olive oil, parsley, thyme, garlic and lemon juice. Grill for one minute on
each side. How to find them: there are more than a dozen species of
puffball, and all are edible.
The giant variety likes rich soil and is usually found in nettle patches, or
often on the site of an ancient midden or a long-gone haystack. You’ll find
them in mixed farming and dairy areas, such as the West Country.
There’s a good chance of finding one on the National Trust’s foray at
Polesden Lacey in Surrey, on October 24 (01372 452048; £8, children £6).
BEEFSTEAK FUNGUS (Fistulina hepatica) Hunting mushrooms doesn’t always
mean keeping your eyes and nose to the ground. Bracket fungi get their name
because they look like a bracket or shelf attached to a tree. While they may
sometimes be found at the base of the trunk, they can grow anywhere, so keep
your eyes peeled. Most polypores have a destructive effect on the trees they
parasitise, but there are fringe benefits – this fungus produces a
particularly fine coloration of the oak wood on which it usually grows, and
which it eventually destroys.
The rich mahogany red is valued by furniture-makers. How to cook them: they go
well with eel fillets. First, cut the eel into 8cm chunks. Next, make a
marinade of olive oil, plenty of lemon juice, garlic and some mint leaves,
pour over the eel and leave for 3-4 hours. Clean and cut the mushrooms
thinly, sauté for five minutes, then add cream, dill, salt and pepper. Grill
the eel for five minutes on each side, then mix with the mushrooms. Serve
with bread.
Where to find them: in summer and autumn, they emerge from the trunks of
diseased deciduous trees. The host can be ash, but is most often oak – often
in ancient woodland and the deer parks of stately homes. Easily
identifiable, the fleshy red slabs with pale undersides “bleed” when cut.
You can’t confuse this with any other fungus.
There will be a mushroom hunt on October 13 and 14 at Attingham Park in
Shropshire (01743 708162; £5/£2.50).
BAY BOLETE ( Boletus badius) This is one of the most common edible wild
mushrooms – I used to take dried specimens with me when I went back to Italy
to visit my family. After one successful hunt, my wife and I had to build
piles of them at the side of the path and pick them up later. We filled the
car boot with them and still left plenty for other people.
The pores underneath the hat are creamy and turn green with age. They are
softer than ceps; don’t be put off by slight discoloration when cut open.
How to cook them: exactly the same way as the cep (see previous page). Where
to find them: the bay bolete is closely related to the cep and is
superficially similar, if a little darker and smaller.
The flesh and gills turn blue/green when cut or lightly pressed with a thumb,
which gave rise to the old wives’ tale that poisonous mushrooms turn blue
when touched with a penny. Like ceps, they grow along woodland edges,
particularly in western areas, but generally emerge a fortnight earlier,
becoming frequent from early September. These and other boletuses should be
on offer at the National Trust’s Gibside foray in Tyne and Wear on September
30 (01207 570229).
All forays must be booked in advance, as numbers are limited. Antonio
Carluccio will be hosting a series of traditional open-air mushroom markets
at his caffes: Spitalfields (September 21-23), Windsor (September 28-30) and
Oxford (October 5-7). For more details, visit www.carluccios.com.
His new store at Garrick Street, WC2, has fresh, dried, wild and cultivated
mushrooms for sale
CHOCOLATE AND HONEY
IN AN old cattle barn above Castleton, in the Peak District, Dave Golubows
pulls on a rubber glove and invites me to dip his nipples in chocolate. As
you can tell, this isn’t a normal Travel assignment.
There was a time when the only things dipped at Mam Farm were sheep. Today,
Dave and his partner, Bridget Joyce, are dunking nuggets of
strawberry-daiquiri ganache into top-grade Fortina chocolate – and I’m
helping.
As well as their taste-bud-titillating Nipples of Venus, they make chocolate
cavalrymen, ballerinas and goldfish, as well as decadent truffles of every
tincture. Their sophisticated bonbons sell to Harvey Nichols, Maison Blanc
and the Baftas.
The chocolatiers are not the only unlikely barn-dwellers I meet on my two-day
break in the Peak District. There is Rob Evans, a former PE teacher who now
brews ale in an owl roost beside Chatsworth House. And Mark Dennison, a
sorting-office manager who traded the Royal Mail for royal jelly, and puts
on body armour to tend his beehives on the heather uplands.
None of these enterprises was here three years ago, and all have been
recruited by a pint-sized pudding-maker called Karen Beresford as
attractions on her new foodie tours of the district.
The trips promise to take visitors to meet cottage food producers in their own
cottages, and maybe have a dabble in their craft.
“These days, people want to know where their dinner comes from,” Karen tells
me. “This is a chance to go down on the farm and see the pride we take in
what we do.”
A farmer’s wife, Karen has watched Britain’s “real food” revolution sweep
across the Peak. A region whose cuisine once amounted to mutton pies and
Bakewell puddings is now sprinkled with artisan bakers, ham-curers and
cheese-makers. And, as you drive through the creamy limestone countryside,
it’s striking – the farm-shop finger posts in every village, the tearoom
menus trumpeting their commitment to local nosh: “Bread from Buxton, ice
cream from Wildboarclough, stilton from across the square.”
Their honey, you can bet, hails from Daisybank Apiaries at Newtown, and
Karen’s itinerary includes 90 minutes with born-again beekeeper Dennison,
getting costumed up and trying your hand.
Like Dave and Bridget, Mark and his wife, Mandy, are self-confessed “Good
Lifers”, rat-race refuseniks who have fled town in search of a greener life
for their children. Their home is another rescued byre in yet more
chocolate-box scenery, and Mark springs out to greet me, lean of ankle and
craggy of brow, clad in Lycra leggings and rock-climbing trainers.
“Beekeeping is the adventure sport of food tourism,” he beams.
“It’s the most fun and the most dangerous... The best thing about bees? The
sting. Otherwise, everyone would have a hive in the garden, and I wouldn’t
have a business.”
They are quite vicious, then? “The trouble is,” Mandy cuts in, “when bees
sting, they emit a pheromone to attract others to defend the hive. I can
always tell when Mark comes home badly stung. You can smell it.”
“Don’t worry,” Mark says. “So long as you stay relaxed around the hives,
you’ll be fine.”
Got that? When venturing into the lair of 50,000 poisonous insects, whatever
you do, don’t get stressed!
We climb into our Guantanamo-style overalls, zip on our hoods and head towards
the bottom of the garden. With a puff of his magic bee-subduing smoke, Mark
lifts the lid on an eye-popping world of sex, birth and housework.
I’m given a fingertip tour of the intricate black-bee community. He points out
the queen and finds a furry baby; we even watch a newborn bee clamber out
from its honeycomb cocoon. And suddenly I understand it – the buzz that Mark
gets from insect husbandry.
Not all of Karen Beresford’s hosts are stressed-out city escapees like Mark,
Dave and Rob. Between the have-a-go honey-gathering and truffle-dipping
sessions, we stop for lunches in the stout farmhouse kitchens of people like
Nick and Helen Bonsall, second-generation beef-producers, at Stanshope, on
the rooftop of Dovedale. I visit their rare-breed pigs, Ugly and Uglier,
tickle the noses of some inordinately cute day-old calves, and sit on the
very chair that the Prince of Wales occupied when he dropped in by
helicopter this summer to save Peak District hill-farming.
That sounds glib, but Helen has only praise for the Peak Choice initiative, a
new internet cooperative that couriers boxes of traditionally reared
Derbyshire beef and lamb to customers across the country. Prince Charles
came up with the idea, found cash for the delivery van and even did the logo
– a rather fetching watercolour of the hamlet of Abney.
The last stop on my food trail is for sausage and mash with the Gilmans at
Hearthstone, their organic farm on Bilberry Knoll. “Beware free-range
children and animals,” says the sign on the gate, and Ian and Joyce Gilman
are assisted at work by their 13-year-old granddaughter, Annabel, who is
very much in charge of lambing.
Joyce forks out the pork-and-ale bangers, made this morning in the farm shop
across the yard. They’re sensational – almost worth the price of my holiday
alone. We talk about their decision to chuck out the chemicals in 2002. “The
wildlife is phenomenal now,” Ian says. “We’ve got badgers, buzzards,
sparrowhawks. And our animals have a happier life, grow more slowly and
taste better because of that.
“But organic makes sense economically for us, too. It gives us an edge.
Customers like to have a look round the farmyard before they buy – some even
bring apples for our pigs. All the same, we don’t make a fortune. It’s a
struggle. We do it because it’s so great for the children. We do it to live
here, basically.”
It’s an echo of what the others have told me: Mark the apiarist, Rob the
brewer, Dave the truffle king. From neophyte smallholders to hard-bitten
farmers, all are trying to live the dream, carve a niche in Britain’s
fast-shifting rural economy. And, as I head home, car boot groaning with
Bakewell Best bitter, Cocoadance truffles, Daisybank honey and Hearthstone
Farm sausages, I realise it’s not the samples I’ll remember from my Peak
District food break, it’s the stories.
Karen Beresford’s breaks (01298 23618, www.peakdistrictshortbreaks.co.uk
) include hands-on visits to food producers, two farmhouse lunches and two
nights’ B&B accommodation. Itineraries vary; the maximum group
size is six, and you can drive yourself or travel in Karen’s people-carrier.
Six breaks are scheduled for the autumn, with prices starting at £249pp.
Both Cocoadance (01433 621334, www.cocoadance.com
) and Daisybank Apiaries (01298 83829, www.daisybankapiaries.co.uk
) offer stand-alone visitor sessions where you can make chocolates and meet
the bees: call for dates and prices. Joyce Gilman does excellent B&B at
Hearthstone Farm (01629 534304, www.hearthstonefarm.co.uk
; doubles from £65)
by Vincent Crump
GONE FISHING
SEVENTEEN METRES below the choppy surface of Lyme Bay there is a wreck – the
carcass of the SS Baygitano, torpedoed in 1918 by a German U-boat. And,
lingering a few inches from the rusty hull, nosing around for tasty
crustaceans and sharing a joke with his fishy pals, there’s a foot-long
silvery-sided pollock called Jackson.
Or, rather, there was. But I’ve eaten him. And very delicious he was too.
I’m on a Catch & Cook day organised by the chef Hugh
Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Devon-based HQ, River Cottage. The idea is simple:
fish tastes best when you’ve caught it yourself, as long as you have some
idea how to prepare and cook it. So, it’s a morning out on the boats,
learning the rudiments of angling, then an afternoon of cookery
demonstrations and hands-on filleting back at the cottage, followed by a
fishy feast.
Which brings us back to Jackson. As Phil Hodder, our group’s captain for
the morning, carefully drops anchor away from the wreck and lets the tide
sweep us over it, Fraser Christian, our man from River Cottage, explains why
this is a promising spot.
“You’ve got to picture the tide a bit like the wind on land,” he tells us.
“Bottom-feeders will shelter in the lee of reefs and wrecks, just like farm
animals behind a dry-stone wall. It means they can let the current bring
their food to them.” Fraser instructs us in the mysteries of using the rods
and landing the fish. If you get a bite, reel in quickly and steadily: the
main thing is to keep tension on the line so they can’t slip the hook.
We bait with mackerel strips, let the weights take them to the bottom and pull
up a few feet. Then it all gets a bit zen.
“Forget your eyes and ears – seeing and hearing don’t help,” says Fraser.
“It’s all about touch. You’ve got to feel the fish, sense them through your
line.” We grasp our rods and close our eyes, like Jedi novices under the
instruction of an angling Obi-Wan Kenobi, feeling the fishy force.
We wait. And wait. For a while, our group of eight nod sagely to each other,
agreeing that it’s not the catching that matters but the relaxation, the
scenery and the sheer pleasure of being out on the water. Bunkum, of course,
and after a barren hour rocking in the heavy swell, I may have achieved
cosmic balance, but I’m no closer to getting fed.
And then, bam! I’m unprepared for the surge of adrenaline, the heart-stopping
thrill of a bite, that sudden tug that tells you lunch is down there – but
it won’t jump on the plate by itself. I strike hard and reel in fast,
feeling the fish turn and pull. It’s not smooth and it’s not pretty, but I
land him, somehow: a fine, silvery foot-long pollock, writhing indignantly
on the hook.
The next bit isn’t for the squeamish. Fraser shows how to dispatch him swiftly
– a firm tug on the jaw and his backbone is broken. Then his gills are
slashed, to let the blood seep out, and a knife in the anal gland starts the
gloopy process of gutting. You may wince, but something about the process
feels profoundly right. This isn’t just about getting the freshest food
possible, it’s about taking responsibility for what you eat.
If you’re prepared to consume something, it seems to me that you should be
prepared to kill it. Somebody killed that week-old fish on the supermarket
slab, too, and the fact that it was done out of sight doesn’t make it any
more humane.
Evidently, Jackson has started a trend. As if the bell for elevenses has been
rung, they’re now biting all over the place: mackerel, pouting, bream,
dogfish, john dory, even a conger eel. As we work the reels, our stomachs
rumble. This lot looks good enough to eat. Soon.
Back to shore and into the kitchen. First off, we’ll try it raw: mackerel
sashimi, with Fraser, also a trained chef, showing how. The flesh is firm
and the flavour is surprisingly delicate. Where you’d expect a fishy tang
(in fact, that’s a sign of decomposition), this is fresh, clean... in fact,
it doesn’t taste of fish at all. It tastes of the sea.
Now it’s our turn. Fraser had wielded the knife delicately but decisively,
liberating big, juicy fillets. But it’s trickier than it looks, and by the
time we’ve all finished, you’d think we’d been fishing with grenades.
Thankfully, the real chefs have been labouring away in the kitchen, and the
day is topped off with a sensational late lunch. We have a delicate pollock
tart, mains of zesty salsa-verde mackerel and fried bream that melts in the
mouth like a briny marshmallow. With veg that’s just as fresh, there’s
nothing on the plate that wasn’t growing, photosynthesising or swimming a
few hours ago.
And, by God, you can taste it. I quietly toast Jackson with a glass of rather
good English wine. He may not swim again, but he didn’t die in vain. River
Cottage (01297 630300, www.rivercottage.net
) has two more Catch & Cook days this year, priced at £225pp. There are
scores of boats running regular sea-fishing trips around the UK; find the
one nearest to you at www.ukcharterboats.co.uk
by Stephen Bleach
How to cook mackerel by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
HUMANS HAVE an instinct to kill for food – fishing for your supper is the best
way to do that responsibly. Few of us have the chance to kill and cook a
pig, but anyone on holiday in a British seaside town can go out with a
friendly skipper and catch a few mackerel.
I have two favourite ways to cook them at the moment. The first is simple: lay
fillets of the fish in a baking tray, skin-side down, with a few bay leaves
underneath, a scattering of chopped garlic on the top, salt and pepper, and
place in a very hot oven for about six minutes.
The other is completely different, an old Japanese recipe. Get small whole
mackerel, head and tail off, and add a mixture of soy sauce, ginger, garlic,
chilli, a little sugar and some apple juice. See they’re just covered, then
simmer them for three hours. They don’t fall apart, they just take in this
amazing sauce. It’s a bit like tinned sardines, very tender but highly
flavoured, and the bones are soft enough to eat. They taste even better if
you caught the fish yourself.
