It’s the perfect time to enjoy safe ceps

MOVIE stars have their Oscars, sports stars get medals and cups, but I did my own lap of honour after a country ramble during our saturated summer yielded 2lb of wild mushrooms, including my favourite: the cep, left. I once spent a couple of days on a foraging course, where wild food experts tried to persuade us of the deliciousness of dandelions, seaweed and ground elder. Are boiled nettles like spinach? Only if you boil your tastebuds beforehand. Are primrose flowers like sweets and ground acorns like coffee? Perhaps, to a Second World War evacuee. Also beware of anything that is described as ‘like coconut’, especially if applied to gorse flowers, a mushroom called dryad’s saddle and the young leaves of a bramble bush. In all cases, the chew was closer to coconut matting.

On the other hand, fresh wild mushrooms deserve their rave reviews and rainy summers tend to flush out fruiting fungi, although it goes without saying that if there’s any doubt as to what you’re picking, it’s best to leave well alone.

I once met another forager toting an enormous bag of mushroom finds home for the pot. Reluctantly, he let me have a peek at his treasures, all picked on the basis that if they had been nibbled by local animals and insects, or looked like mushrooms in children’s books, they were probably fine.

As it turned out, he had assembled an astonishing mixed grill of the edible, the unpleasant, the hallucinogenic and the downright deadly. As the saying goes, there are old mushroom pickers and there are bold mushroom pickers.

But there are no old, bold mushroom pickers.