France in Focus

The trompette-de-la-mort has a distnctive, hollow shape and dark colour, from grey to black. Its delicate flavour and rarity make it a much-loved culinary delicacy, enhancing sauces, pies, omelettes or a wild mushroom soup. They like cool, damp environments. Difficult to spot because they hide under carpets of dead leaves at the foot of oak, chestnut or beech trees. One of our neighbours knows exactly where to find them in the forests, as a hunter he must have seen every square meter more than once the last fifty years. Yesterday he gave us a bowl full these mushrooms.