A taste of Autumn

Autumn woods

The wind is in the north. Skeins of geese are honking their way south. The scrogs are littering the woodland floor. The hedgerows are red with hips and haws. The local roe deer are changing their coats from the russet of summer to the hodden grey of winter. Autumn is surely here.
The wild flowers are long since seeded and gone. Now is the time for the fungi to suddenly come forth. Overnight, the woods are full of these colourful, slightly alien arrivals.

Fungi have always been a bit of a mystery. Mushrooms are great but we tend to be put off their cousins in the woods by lack of knowledge about what is good and what is not good to eat.
We did have parasol mushrooms growing under the hawthorn hedge one year and LotH has had adventures gathering field mushrooms on land occupied by a large bull but, by and large, we stick to the supermarket variety which are fairly bland to the taste.

O.K. to eat?

This week I discovered ceps, or thought that’s what they were, was almost certain that’s what they were, in a patch of mixed woodland.

Ceps, porcino, the penny bun boletus, Boletus edulis, known in Italy and France as the King of Mushrooms.

Penny bun cep

Picking the largest and taking it home to consult the books, I still had a scintilla of doubt but it seemed to be the same. We had dined with a farmer friend whose wife, superb cook that she is, had served us with wild mushroom soup while her husband had mischievously recounted the tale of a party in the Highlands who had all ended up on dialysis after mistaking one fungus for another. Needless to say, the soup was delicious

Home for the pot

LotH , fungophile that she is, was convinced my trophy was genuine, and bold enough to try some raw then proceed to sauté it in butter. It had, as the book said it would, the perfect mushroom flavour… and we are still here.