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by Catherine Harper
May is a green month, a growing month, a season of bees and blossoms, but not for the most part a season when things are born. And yet during the weeks surrounding the first of May, two of my most cherished foods come into fruit, foods that are also among the most fleeting of the year, morels and wild strawberries.
Morels, the shy and elusive woodland mushrooms, emerge out of the April rains. These are strange mushrooms, stem and caps grown together and hollow so that the mushroom sliced crosswise looks like a little balloon or bottle, with the surface of the cap honeycombed with ridges of a spore surface that replaces the gills familiar from grocery-store mushrooms. Morels' flesh is thin but dense, their flavor a revelation, especially to many of us who tend to dislike mushrooms.
Hunting morels is almost a religion all on its own. Until one has spent time with morels, become familiar with their patterning and gotten a feel for their habits, these mushrooms tend to merge into the dried leaves, grass and pinecones among which they grow and can only be seen by the experienced eye. Many people hunt morels who hunt no other mushroom. Each person has their own rituals, their favored tools and garb, their own techniques for courting the mushroom. For some, the hunt is communal, a celebration carried out in the company of their co-religionists. For others, perhaps the majority of all morelers, the hunt is shrouded in secrecy, a solitary pursuit, and the location of favorite hunting grounds a closely held mystery.
If the pursuit was not already difficult enough, morel mycelia are short-lived and fickle. (Mycelia are the underground fungal filaments from which morels fruit.) Whereas in many cases other mushrooms can be hunted in the same location year after year, morels are much more unpredictable. They tend to fruit in a single location for only a few years, sometimes only a single year. They show up in disturbed sites, in the odd load of landscaping bark and in burn sites. In fact, one of the best ways of finding morels is to go to those places that suffered forest fires the summer of the year before last. The only places I know where morels can be relied upon to appear year after year are certain established orchards, especially apple orchards. And no, I'm not going to tell you where any are.
Some years, the hunter comes home empty-handed. Even in good years, I often find mushrooms only by accident and come home from the planned excursions with empty baskets. Some years, lucky years, you can find yourself with mushrooms by the gallon. (For those of you who would like to judge such bounty in monetary terms, think on the fact that morels are seldom found for less than $15 a pound.) Though morels dry well and can be saved and used throughout the year, I think it wise not to treat such a blessing in a miserly manner. On the years when we have such luck, the first portion goes to a feast to which we invite all our friends. After all, if the mycelia don't like you, your luck will be poor in future years. It's good magic to make the mushroom happy.
Morels are unusual among mushrooms in other ways too. Most mushrooms spring up quickly and fall nearly as fast. A bolete can grow to maturity in the course of a good rainy day. On the third day, it will be riddled with bugs. A morel will mature over the course of weeks, and while humans are not the only things that find them delectable, most bugs found in them late in life can easily be brushed off. Most morels you see commercially harvested are only a couple of inches tall, but I have taken more than a few for my own use that have exceeded eight inches. And even in this land of damp and rot, where some kinds of fungus can be found almost any time of the year, morels are unusual in that they prefer to fruit only in spring. The season for morels begins in the lowlands and in the south, heading up into the hills and northward with the first greening of the trees.
But no matter how carefully you plan your season, eventually the year will warm into May and the morels will be gone. My favorite way of acknowledging this is the day that I go to my favorite cottonwood patch and find the ground covered with wild strawberries. Sometimes I'm a little bit stubborn that way. It seems that in theory you should be able to collect morels in the mountains in the morning, break for lunch, and then spend the afternoon picking wild strawberries in the lowlands, but it never seems to work out that way for me. There's the one, and then there's the other. I have never caught them passing each other as they trade places.
Wild strawberries are another wild food unmatched by anything commonly available. It often amazes me that people bother at all with their huge and flavorless commercial cousins. Breeding has made the berries bigger but has merely stretched the intense sweet tart taste of the single tiny wild berry across the swollen flesh of the cultivated variety. And wild berries become ripe usually before the local cultivated berries do.
Wild strawberry plants are low, and the berries tend to hide under the lobed leaves, so watch carefully for them on sunny hillsides. The berries themselves are no bigger than half the last joint of your little finger, and longer and more pointed than the store bought berries, and sometimes are white as well as red. The season follows the same course as that of morels, though it follows some weeks later. Morels are the fruit of the warming damp spring; strawberries are among the first gifts of the sun.
Finding the strawberries is much easier than finding morels, but picking them is a lot more work. You can spend hours on your knees picking everything you can reach and then moving only a few feet to start again, and still only have a quart or two to show for your efforts. But be heartened; a quart or two is flavor beyond measure. The most important thing to remember when planning how to eat your strawberries is that they are very strongly flavored and as such are best used sparingly.
I don't know why more people don't make strawberry shortcake. Perhaps all the out-of-season pre-fab desserts have given it a bad name? It's only worth the effort when the berries are in season and the ingredients are fresh, but then it's easy and heavenly.
Wash one cup (or more) of wild strawberries and layer them with the lightest sprinkling of sugar in a bowl, pressing them with the back of a spoon just a little to release the juices.
Of course, if you don't have wild strawberries, you can make do with cultivated ones. The local berries that are evenly red, plump and soft will be the best (but will show up later). If you must buy imports, buy organic -- strawberries are more likely than most berries to be contaminated, and fungicides don't help their flavor. In either case, get at least a pint of the berries, and two won't hurt. Slice the berries (an egg slicer speeds this up), sprinkle them with sugar and add the juice of half a lemon. If they're imported berries, add the juice of a whole lemon, and more sugar. Blend and let them set a bit.
1/4 c. butter
1/2 c. cream
1/2 c. sugar
1 egg
2 c. flour
1 scant tsp. baking powder
Pinch salt
Cream together the sugar and butter, blend in the cream and egg. In a separate container (say a large measuring cup), combine the flour and baking powder and then mix these dry ingredients into the wet ones with a few quick strokes. Form the dough into two balls, knead them just enough to get them to hold together and then squash them down flat and cut them into quarters. Yes, you can roll the dough out to half an inch and then cut it into circles, and it will look more like shortcake if you do. But making it this way tastes just as good -- maybe better, because the dough is handled less -- and is a lot easier. Bake at 350 degrees for about half an hour, or until the shortcake just turns golden brown around the edges.
This mixture is what I make for scones, too, incidentally.
Get fresh cream. Really -- don't use the cream you've been pouring into your coffee for the last two weeks, get some fresh cream, and while you're at it make it organic. It matters in this sort of dish. Whip a cup of cream with &fraq14; cup sugar until it just barely forms peaks when a spoon is pulled out of it. It shouldn't be too dry.
Give each person a bowl, with one or two pieces of shortcake hot out of the oven cut in half (to open the inside, as you would with an English muffin). Encourage each person to smother their cake in whipping cream and then dot the top with the wild berries. If you're not using wild berries, use great spoonfuls of the cultivated varieties. Eat quickly and get back into the kitchen for seconds.
Prepare one cup of wild strawberries (more or less) as described above.
Mix two cups cream, one cup milk, two eggs and half a cup of sugar.
Freeze the cream mixture in an ice cream freezer according to the manufacturer's instructions. In our case, that means put the cream in the metal cylinder, pack ice and rock salt around it and recruit a bunch of friends to help crank. At the point when the ice cream is beginning to set, add the strawberries and mix for a minute or two more.
2 or 3 shallots
Morels
Butter
Sour cream
Cream sherry
Salt
In a wide pan, sauté 2 or 3 medium shallots in a bit of butter. Add to this at least a double handful of morels, cleaned and coarsely chopped (if you have fewer morels, you can add button mushrooms. or perhaps a bit of chicken). Sauté the mixture for at least five minutes, adding a little water as the mushrooms begin to stick, and then add water enough to cover the bottom of the pan. Simmer for a few minutes until the water is mostly evaporated, and then add about a cup of sour cream -- more if you have more mushrooms or other things to cover, less if you're only making a small quantity. Add a good glug of cream sherry and salt to taste and serve over a bed of egg noodles.