September 8, 2015 Savannah, Georgia: Today would have been my dear friend Chuck Dalby’s 69th birthday, but we lost him to cancer in April. He and I spent years gardening and cooking and canning together, and we foraged for persimmons and wild cherries as well. He also endured my attempts with salicornia, lamb’s quarters, and mollusks I gathered at low tide at his home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; the results were not worth writing about. He was always encouraging me to write — to share my recipes and tales — and so I feel compelled to honor his spirit with writing about another foraged treat, chanterelles.

I’ve never seen rain so persistent as it has been here in Savannah this year. It has rained every day that I have been home this summer. I know that it didn’t rain a couple of days when I was gone, but it also rained so much on three occasions that my garage flooded. Seems I’ve seen contractors as often as I have seen friends. Nevertheless, there is one good thing about the rain, and that is the preponderance of mushrooms. I have written about chanterelles before — first in Charleston’s alternative newspaper, OMNIBUS, back in 1988, and then, more extensively, in my first book, which was released in 1992.

Encouraged not only by my mother’s adventurous culinary spirit, but also by my father’s Appalachian traditions of gathering pawpaws, huckleberries, and hickory nuts, I have always wondered about the edibility of plants and animals that I have encountered in the woods and on  shorelines. Mother’s vast culinary library included  Euell Gibbons’s foraging books published in the 60s — Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, and Stalking the Healthful Herbs, so I had them to use as my guides.  My own library of field guides already included several mushroom books, and by the time I returned to the lowcountry to live in 1986, I had spent several years mushroom-hunting in Europe, though I wasn’t very good at it. In Italy, we looked mostly for the King Bolete, Boletus edulis,  the beloved porcini of Italy and the cèpe of France, but we also sought out other edible varieties such as “Colombina,” Russula cyanoxantha, which, as its name suggests, is bluish-yellow. The porcini, I thought, would be easy to identify, but Celestina, my friend’s mother, would invariably toss out all my finds, make me wash my hands, and wash the bag I had used. Some of the edible ones bleed blue or green when bruised, but some of the poisonous ones do, too. Having experimented with psychedelic mushrooms when I was younger, I well knew the mind-altering properties of some of the chemicals in mushrooms. I also knew that there were mushrooms that could kill you. Melt your liver. Destroy your immune system. So I’ve never taken any chances.

Mama only picked the agarics that grew in our yard. These are the common “meadow” or “field” mushrooms — Agaricus campestris —  that are found on lawns throughout North America, often appearing in fairy rings. Most often she sautéed them and added them to omelets, but they found their way into spaghetti sauces as well. The common “champignons de Paris,” Agaricus bisporous, cultivated in France since the 18th century and now available throughout the world, has never been my favorite fungus. I find that I have to cook it a very long time to rid it of most of its moisture before there is much flavor at all. As Euell Gibbons pointed out in 1962, “we tend to judge all mushrooms by how closely the taste resembles that of the cultivated mushroom, which is only one species of Agaricus.” He knew that “the different species are cooked in different ways and used for different purposes.”

Imagine my delight the first time I saw a morel — as large as my hand — in a market in Paris, especially when the shopkeep told me to treat it like a steak! I took it home and cooked it in a frying pan with some butter, but it would have been better had I looked in a few cookbooks. Alas, I was living the life of the “starving artist” at the time and I had none! I should have simmered it first in salted water to remove the grit. Shortly thereafter, I moved to Italy, where my true love of all manner of fungi began. On trips to other nooks and crannies of Europe, Africa, and Asia, I have eaten many different types of mushrooms, both cultivated and wild — white truffles in the Piedmont region of Italy, lactaires (Lactarius deliciosus — milky delicious)  in the Languedoc, pecan grove truffles in south Georgia (the state, not the country), tree ears in China, oyster mushrooms in South Africa, puffballs from Rock Creek Park in Washington, and hedgehogs, Hydnum repandum, in Bulgaria.

I love them all, but I really love chanterelles, if for no other reason than they are mine for the taking. Nothing else really looks like them and they appear under live oaks in the lowcountry after rains by the thousands. Elio Schaechter is Distinguised Professor of Molecular Biology and Microbiology at Tufts School of Medicine. In his In the Company of Mushrooms, he wrote,”Mushrooms, like blueberries, raspberries, and most other foods, taste better if you pick them yourself,” acknowledging, like Gibbons, that mushrooms “may have the pungency of truffles, the spicy aroma of matsutake, and the seafood-like taste of oyster mushrooms. In texture, they can be crunchy, glutinous, chewy, or slight stringy (like chicken meat.” They are usually cooked in fat — butter or oil — and rarely stand alone, though they are commonly stuffed. They are also added to complex dishes to add an earthen quality. Since most mushrooms are 85-95 percent water, long, slow cooking is preferred. I take out my biggest cast iron skillet, melt a stick of butter, add some chopped shallots, and as many chanterelles — cut so that all the pieces are the same size as the smallest mushrooms — as the pot will hold. I leave it on low and stir it occasionally. I cook them for about an hour before adding them to sauces or egg dishes.

Nearly every recipe I have found involves sautéing chanterelles in butter or braising them in cream, no matter what the end result. The flavors are best carried by those fats, but they can be braised with corn or squashes, with carrots, with chicken, or greens. They are sometimes paired with nuts. I gave several recipes in my first book (and on the blog on September 3, 2009), but, like most, I usually add them to egg dishes or sauces. I recently braised rabbits and chanterelles in a mustard cream sauce.

We gathered about 15 pounds of them this weekend and they were sautéed and added to crackers as appetizers, to a sauce for steaks, and to a frittata. For the steak sauce, I sautéed the mushrooms with chopped shallots until they had given off most of their liquid. I seared cold, thick salted rib eyes, per Pat LaFrieda’s instructions, in a hot cast iron pan. After 5 minutes I flipped the steaks, turned down the heat, and let them go another 4 or 5 minutes. I removed the steaks to a platter, deglazed the pan with red wine, drained the butter from the mushrooms into the pan and whisked it in with a few more shallots. I stirred in the chanterelles and served the sauce with the steaks, which were delicious, grass-fed beef. The frittata included some spinach and feta as well.

I know Chuck would have loved either of those meals.