'shrooms

A mushroom being beautiful doesn't mean it's edible. But, as it happens, three of our most attractive 'shrooms are also three of our best comestibles.

Mushroom season started early this year. The rainstorms of the past few weeks produced a bonanza of mosquitos but also early crops of chanterelles and chicken mushroom, both among the best and safest of edible fungi. The chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius; also known as girolles) have continued to emerge. These are those waxy yellow fungi with the gills running down the outside and no clear distinction between cap and stem (there is also a red or purple version, Cantharellus cinnabarinus, that often grows with the yellow and is equally good). Chanterelles are undoubtedly our most common A+ wild mushroom edible. These are quite easy to identify once you are familiar with them but, as with all mushrooms, you should know what you're doing. I once had someone call me on the phone and ask me if I could verify the identification of the beautiful chanterelles that he had collected. He gave me a perfect description of them but I still hesitated to give a confirmed diagnosis over the phone and asked him to bring a couple of them around to inspect 'in the flesh'. He did and the mushrooms turned out to be the size of brass-band trumpets; real Chanterelles rarely get much bigger than little tin horns and size was the one feature that was never mentioned in our telephone conversation! They have a fruity oder that is somewhere between ripe plums and raspberries and they are slightly peppery to the test when eaten raw (the German word for them is Pfifferling or Little Pepper) but the peppery taste disappears on cooking (recommended!). The classic way of cooking these mushrooms is in a cream sauce but they can be prepared in a lot of ways and they make a great accompaniment to many dishes.

The Chicken Mushroom has multiple names (Sulfur Shelf, Chicken-of-the-Woods, Polyporus sulphureus, Grifola sulphurea, Laetiporus sulphureus) but is one of the easiest of mushrooms to recognize and one of the best-known wild fungi. It generally shelves out from the base of a tree or a stump (it sometimes grows on the ground in the form of a rosette in which case there is almost certainly buried wood underneath). It is usually a brilliant orange-yellow looking more like an improbable cluster of giant candy-corn-colored coral than a mushroom. If it is fresh, the flesh is soft and moist to the touch and almost the whole mushroom can be eaten. If it is somewhat (but not too much) older, you can trim off the soft tips for eating purposes.

Another good edible mushroom that has started to appear is a very beautiful Lactarius with a velvety orange-brown cap, cream-colored gills and lightly orange stem. Like other mushrooms in this genus, it exudes milky, sticky drops -- white in this case -- when bruised or cut (hence the name). For a long time, I thought this mushroom was Lactarius volemus (Tawny or Weeping Milk Cap) but I now think it's more likely to be the similar Lactarius hygrophoroides or Hygrophorus Milky Cap; fortunately both are edible and equally good (in fact, hygrophoroides is said to be even be better than volemus which I have probably never tasted).

Eric Salzman

P.S.: My wife, Lorna Salzman, has a blog that concerns itself with such topics as politics, evolution, ecology and culture! It goes under the name of Snickersnee, its address is , it's published on Mondays and Fridays and there are archives going back to its start in March. Stimulating reading and highly recommended!