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Preparing
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St. George's mushroom
Calocybe gambosa · Fungus
40 pairings
The St. George's mushroom (Calocybe gambosa) is a prized spring delicacy of the European countryside, named for its habit of fruiting around St George's Day (23 April) — one of the very few good edible mushrooms to appear in quantity in April and May, months ahead of the autumn crop. A stout, thick-fleshed, creamy-white to buff mushroom with crowded white gills, a rounded cap and a solid stem, it springs up in rings and troops in grazed pasture, downland, hedge-banks and woodland edges. Its unmistakable mark is smell: a strong, fresh, mealy scent of new flour or cucumber that both identifies it and, cooked, gives it a distinctive rich, savoury character valued across Britain, France, Italy and Spain.
Picking a good onedrag
Dry, dense, smells of new flourSlimy, tunnelled, sour and grey
Stall freshHow you will actually buy it, and it cooks best of all here. Butter, garlic, an omelette. Buy from a seller who can name the picker, never from a stranger's basket.Everyday best
CapEdge flattened, a bruise or two, still dry
Flesh in the handFirm, gives a little under the thumb
Gills and cut baseGills cream, cut base drying tan, stem solid
SmellMealy still, quieter, clean underneath
What to look for, from dry, dense, smells of new flour to slimy, tunnelled, sour and grey.
Keeping ittap a band
A domestic fridge holds it about 2× longer than the counter.
Humidity
95%
Damp air, dry caps. Wild ones come in gritty — brush them, never wash before storing: standing water on a cap feeds the surface bacteria that blotch it.
Airflow
Paper bag, never sealed
A paper bag, never sealed plastic. Shut in film these thick caps sweat, and AH-66 is explicit that water must not be left to condense inside the pack.
Caps brown beside ripe fruit
Mushrooms make almost no ethylene but brown in it (AH-66) — keep the bag off the shelf with apples, pears and ripening bananas.