There's gold in them there hills!

I've never been lucky with mushroom hunting. Like all Michiganders I am familiar with morels and the lore around them. I keep a sharp eye out when walking in the spring and have gone out once or twice to find some but to no avail.

Always prized and usually elusive, morels are the stuff of legend--the serendipitous glade full of morels found while walking; the secret spots that produce year after year; injunctions about preferred habitats and neighbors: dead oaks, old apple orchards, burn patches. In fact there is no logic--just luck. In this way, morel stories remind of me of fish stories---"and it was THIS big."

Over 14 ounces!

But in recent years, my mother has found one or two each spring in her yard and this May we hit the mother lode! We were positively giddy as we picked them--carefully leaving a few to spore out and hopefully come back again next year.

But what to do with them? While always good simply sautéed in butter with salt and pepper, this seemed to call for a greater effort. But it's actually hard to find a good recipe that celebrates the morel without overwhelming them. In fact, it's hard to find recipes at all. Some of my upper Midwest books mentioned them, but most recipes used dried mushrooms. Others were less than forthcoming with details about cooking them. The consensus was simpler is better. In fact, the morel entry in the Woman's Day Encyclopedia of Cookery from 1966 basically implied it was insane to do anything but sauté them.

I did check out Kitchen Magic with Mushrooms from the Mycological Society of San Francisco, but the recipes just didn't appeal. But I do like this book. It is utterly charming with little line drawings in the margins and half sheets illustrating each genus. The cover drew my eye at a book sale because it reminds me of the Florentine papers used in book binding. The recipes, which cover many types of mushrooms, run the gamut from simple to complex. Some are a little convoluted as a way to use up mushrooms and justify the hunt, such as Maramisus Cookies, which combines chocolate chip cookie dough, maraschino cherries and fairy-ring mushrooms. Ugh. Others seem quite palatable, including Puffball French Fries.

I must say that the book has not inspired me to go mushrooming beyond the easily identifiable morel and puffball. The book is quite clear that it is not an identification guide, but reading caution after caution, makes me…well…cautious. Not to mention all those British murder mysteries that employ mushrooms.

In the end, I went with a simple and delicious recipe from Molly O'Neill's A Well-Seasoned Appetite: Recipes from an American Kitchen that mixes sautéed morels with cream, pasta and a little cheese. It was magnificent! This book deserves it own entry, so look for that in the future.

Fettuccine with Morels

1 Tbs butter

3 Tbs chopped shallots

½ pound of fresh morels

1 tsp kosher salt

2 Tbs cognac (I used brandy)

¼ c. heavy cream

2 Tbs. grated Parmesan cheese

1 pound dried fettuccine

3 Tbs chopped Italian parsley

salt and pepper to taste

Melt the butter over medium-high heat. Add the shallots and cook until soft, about 3 minutes. Add the morels and salt and cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes. Add the cognac or brandy and let cook off a bit. Add the cream and simmer for 5-10 minutes. Longer won't hurt and may be better as long as you keep the heat low--you want to infuse the cream with all the good morel flavor.

Meanwhile, get the pasta water boiling. Cook fettuccine until al dente. Drain, reserving some liquid, and mix with the morels and cream. Add the cheese and parley, pepper, and salt if needed. Add ¼ to ½ cup of pasta liquid to loosen sauce as needed. Like all pastas--eat it while it is hot and fresh. I finally realized that one of the reasons pasta is traditionally served as a first course is because larger portions cool and congeal too quickly. Serves 4 as a main course.

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I'll close with something I noticed on a trip to New Orleans at the beginning of Carnival season. In making conversation with locals, it seemed natural to ask them where they liked to view parades but I got a weird vibe after asking this. After noticing the hemming and hawing along with the vagueness of the answers I realized, "Oh! That's like asking someone at home where they find their morels. It's simply not done." In fact, even after people move in Michigan they still don't tell their spots (you know who you are!)

Charleston, SC Part 2

Lee Brothers Keynote Address
 

As I noted earlier, I was in Charleston SC for the annual conference of the Annual Society for Indexing. The keynote speakers were Matt and Ted Lee of the Lee Bros. Boiled Peanuts Catalogue and the authors of several cookbooks, including the IACP and James Beard award winner The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook.

Charming, funny and entertaining, the Lees are natural speakers, and I thoroughly enjoyed their tale of getting started in the food retail business and the process of creating cookbooks. I fear some of my indexing compatriots hoped for rather more indexing talk, but I was busy taking notes about the New York cookbook publishing world, obscure local foods, and where to eat in Charleston.

They began with reminiscing about their childhoods and how it wasn't until they were adults that they realized how fortunate they had been to grow up in Charleston, where food traditions are strong and the microclimate allows for a wide range of produce. As children, they and all the neighborhood kids would forage fruit trees including persimmons, citrus, loquats and mulberries. They went crabbing and shucked oysters. They ate regional foods like glasswort, fig preserves and tomalos (pickled baby green tomatoes). They had a special fish guy for fin fish and another guy for shrimp.

Living in NYC and homesick they began their catalog of foods for displaced Southerners. From that sprang the first book and the rest was culinary history.  In addition to their books, catalogue and other projects they dropped this gem: they run a cookbook bootcamp! It's a two-day seminar about cookbook writing both from the recipe side and the business side. It sounds challenging and fascinating! They understand something it took me years to articulate--a great cookbook isn't just a collection of recipes, it also tells a story.

Alas, they had to wrap up the talk, so I didn't get to ask any questions. But I did get a new cookbook: The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen. It's a good-looking book, with attractive photos of Charleston people and places, as well as the food. I haven't had a chance to try anything yet, but several recipes are on my to-do list, including:

• Pickled Shrimp with Fennel
• Skillet Asparagus with Grapefruit
• Grapefruit Chess Pie
• Caramel Cake

I'd like to make the following, but I fear obtaining the ingredients will prove difficult:

• Loquat Manhattan
• Butter Beans with Butter, Mint, and Lime
• Deviled Crab
• Whole Flounder with Sunchoke and Shrimp Stuffing

Any requests?

Charleston SC, Part 1

 Charleston Receipts

Junior League of Charleston, 1950

Working from home I rarely get to see my colleagues, but once a year the American Society for Indexing has a national conference, and I usually try to go. This year, the conference was in Charleston, SC, which would have been impetus enough to attend, in addition to all the excellent continuing education, trade talk, and just plain fun of being with other people who actually get what I do for a living.

Historic Charleston is charming with its lovingly preserved old homes and gorgeous gardens, plus many great restaurants and rich food traditions. One of those traditions is Charleston Receipts, by some accounts the oldest Junior League community cookbook. My copy is from the thirty-fourth printing in 2009. I think it can be deemed a success.

A friend gave this to me after he served our book group the Hampton Plantation Shrimp Pilau. Though it looks sort of plain on the page, it is a mixture that is greater than the sum of its parts--all savory, shrimp-y and bacon-y rice. I only wish I had had leftovers to fry up the next day for lunch.

Hampton Plantation Shrimp Pilau

By Mrs. Paul Seabrook (Harriott Horry Rutledge)

Charleston Receipts, 1950

4 slices bacon

1 cup rice (raw)

2 Tbs. butter

½ cup celery cut small

2 cups shrimp (cleaned)

2 Tbs chopped bell pepper

salt and pepper to taste

1 tsp. Worcestershire

1 Tbs. flour

water for rice

Fry bacon until crisp. Save to use later. Add bacon grease to water in which you cook rice. In another pot, melt butter, add celery and bell pepper. Cook a few minutes; add shrimp which have been sprinkled with Worcestershire sauce and dredged with flour. Stir and simmer until flour is cooked. Season with salt and pepper. Now add cooked rice and mix until rice is "all buttery" and "shrimp." You may want to add more butter. Into this stir the crisp bacon, crumbled.

I believe my friend adds more Worcestershire sauce to taste and usually doubles or triples the batch, which serves 6.

I think one of the reasons for Charleston's Receipts longevity is it pre-dates the convenience foods boom of the 50s. There are no name-brand recipes in here or canned cream soups. Plain gelatin, canned vegetables and commercial mayonnaise are about it for pre-made ingredients.

There are recipes for punches made by the gallon, crab and shrimp done in myriad ways, a huge section on desserts, and a small, but intriguing, assortment of pickles and preserves. I love the historical reach, including a White Soup that would be at home in a Jane Austen novel.

The book captures several levels of cuisine including Low Country, Gullah, and the French-influenced cuisine of the upper class. Class and race are definitely present in the book. The illustrations are beautiful drawings and paintings, but they romanticize (and possibly caricature) the hard work of Black Charlestonians. Most of the recipes are signed, but given the social structure of Charleston at the time of publication, it can be safely assumed that many of the recipes were created not by their presenters but by the cooks of those presenters.

The Lee brothers, who were the ASI conference keynote speakers and are native Charlestonians, noted this fact in their address and offered some other fun tidbits about the book including the existence of a precursor pamphlet called Charleston Recipes and that the Junior League sued the creator of White Trash Cooking for plagiarism. Oh scandal!

More on the Lee brothers themselves next time….