It looks like a comedy nose

What a strange looking thing to pickle

I must apologise to you as you were supposed to have received this newsletter at the end of last week. I have only my high-maintenance sausage dog to blame. Don’t ask…

It appeared on the kitchen bench looking quite comical. Like the absurdly shaped nose of an imaginary creature. Jamie our forager, beaming with delight at what he’d pulled from an imposing old oak tree, one of many old arboreal giants that live here.

Fistulina hepatica or Beefsteak mushroom

The stories those trees could tell I can only imagine. A vast felled stump once kept me occupied one afternoon, counting its tiny concentric rings using a small twig to keep track of the millimetre-sized gaps between each year. Some year’s rings thicker than others, rainfall I suspect. A historical record of weather. I lost count at around three hundred and forty. They say oak trees take two hundred years to grow, two hundred to live and two hundred to die. This one must have given up at around four hundred. And that would take us back to Tudor England when it was planted.

I quite like that.

Beefsteak mushroom or more terrifyingly Fistulina hepatica. To touch, it feels precisely like Ox-tongue. Coarse, but softly so, not rough like a cat’s tongue but slightly irregular so that your fingertip doesn’t so much glide over what looks smooth, but that instead feels like dulled sandpaper. Though perhaps a little more rubbery than sandpaper. Anyhow. Let’s not get too caught up in minor details.