Walk on the wild side with mushrooms

LAST week, we received a packet of sliced, dried culinary mushrooms from a Czech girl we know.

Her father had picked them in the forest only days before, and had dried them on a sieve.

They are Ceps, all of them, Boletus Edulis, king of culinary mushrooms, the fat, brown-capped, thick-trunked forest giants with the spongy undercarriage. The Germans call them Steinpilz because, I suppose, they look like smooth, brown stones. They will be delicious, reconstituted in water and used in almost any dish where fresh mushrooms are used. A few days later, a man from Bermuda kindly gave me a single Irish Cep which he’d found in a forest near Bantry. There wasn’t a worm in it and it was delicious, fried in olive oil with a little garlic and laid on toast. We are unfortunate in Ireland that edible forest mushrooms and especially the classic Ceps are rare as hen’s teeth over much of the country. There’s nothing like the abundance that I’ve found in the English Home Counties, in Wales, in the Canary Islands and in Bulgaria. Bulgaria was a huge surprise. Two years ago, my brother and I drove to the extreme south where a small river divides Bulgaria from Turkey.