There is much more to being a devout gourmet than going to good restaurants and eating the specialties of fine chefs. When gastronomy becomes a favorite pursuit, you'll want to search Our, along with the best eating places, nature's hard-to-find delicacies. And you should also get better acquainted with some of her more profuse offerings which you may have overlooked. Truffles, morels, mussels, scallops, oddments such as fiddlehead ferns and plovers' eggs as well as such commonplace victuals as tripe and eel, can lure a gourmet into all kinds of markets and out-of- the-way restaurants, and ultimately to cookbooks and his own kitchen. There's always something new to try, even for the most experienced gastronome, though it may seem that you have run the gamut. Right now I'm thinking about three foods of this type: morels, mussels, and snails, all as dear to a Frenchman as le tricolre itself, but to Americans a little bewildering—or so people have told me when they have asked my help in preparing them.
Morels (in French, morilles) are rare and elusive, to say the least. In fact, there is only one time of the year that nature produces them—even then she is far from generous—and that is in early May. If you have never eaten morels, and perhaps even the name is unfamiliar to you because they are so scarce, you may recognize them by another and quite as descriptive name, spring mushrooms. However, morels differ greatly from ordinary mushrooms in that man has never been able to tame them. How well he has learned to raise other mushrooms and increase them by scientific propagation is seen by our abundant year-round supply. Not so with the wild morel. Like the truffle, that other hard-to-come-by fungus, morels appear briefly and only at nature's appointed time; and so far as I know this is the only wild edible fungus (hat grows in the spring.
Most morel lovers have lived where morels grow, have hunted them, carried them home, and waited in blissful anticipation for them to appear on the table. When I was a boy, and in the way of boys did not follow the calendar too closely, le mois de mai would often creep up on me before I realized it. But in addition to my prodding elders there were always natural reminders to tell a country boy when to start looking for morels. If the tightly rolled spikes of lily-of-the-valley had opened and released their fragrant white flower stalks, if you had to watch every step you took through the meadows to avoid crushing the first bright blue violets, and hedgerows suddenly turned white with Dowering aubépine, then you knew it was time to start looking for morels. In mon pays, we found them where meadow and wood lot meet in the sheltered valleys that fell away from our gently rolling hills—they seemed to like the spongy soil compacted with leaf mold that accumulated through the years, and we had learned to look for them in the spots which were neither too shady nor too sunny. In this country I have read of their being found in places as far apart as Connecticut, Montana, and northern Michigan, as well as in Missouri and Ohio. No doubt other states can boast of them too.
In most places morel-hunting is a kind of sport and the find is cleaned, cooked, and eaten the same day, just as it is in France except in sections near enough to gastronomic centers to permit quick transportation to fine restaurants. In Alsace and in the Rhineland country, for example, when the morel sea-sot) arrives, every farmer, with his wife. his children, and his farm hands, is out every day searching under fallen leaves and tangled wild grapevines and pushing aside sprouting ferns to find the conical brune and blonde heads of morels. The season is so short that it is over almost before it starts, but (here's money to be made while it lasts. If the morels can be packed quickly and carefully and sent off immediately on their journey to Paris or Lyons, the chefs of the fine restaurants will pay well for them. In fact, there arc more morels in Alsace than anywhere else in France, making this province the only place in the world where there is what might be called a morel industry.
Morels are recognized by their coneshaped heads, honeycombed and some of them pointed at the top, perched on bulbous stems. There are two colors, dark grayish-brown and beige, or, as the French say, moriilles brunts and morilles blondes. I believe that freshness is probably more important than color; and I do know that stale morels are worse than none at all.
Before cooking morels, remove and discard the bulbous stem ends. Then wash the fungus very thoroughly, because the tiny pockets in the honeycomb surface pick up sand as they push up through the soil. More than ordinary washing is required to (lush out this Sand, M. Tissier always insisted that we waste one morel, as precious as they were, in order to make sure that the rest were well cleaned. We had to bite into a raw one to assure ourselves that the sand had been washed out before we muted to cook them. As a mailer of fact, the only reason for discarding the bulbous stem is that it is almost impossible to clean out the sand that becomes lodged there. After washing the morels, shake out as much water as possible. They are rather watery themselves, and you don't want to leave an additional amount of water.
You can use morels in any dish that calls for mushrooms, or use the recipes which follow. Occasionally it is possible to buy canned morels imported from Europe; but since they don't come in every year, they are not to be depended upon. And sometimes you can buy dried ones in shops that carry foreign delicacies. If you are lucky enough to live where morels grow in abundance, you can dry them yourself. To do this, remove and discard the bulbous stems and with a large kitchen needle thread the morels on a soft white string. Hang them in the sun for several days, then finish the drying indoors in a warm place or in a very slow oven. To use dried morels, soak them for a few hours in lukewarm water, clean them very thoroughly, and prepare them as you would the fresh ones.
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