The Complete Mushroom Book: Savory Recipes for Wild and Cultivated Varieties [Hardcover]

Antonio Carluccio (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 12, 2006

There are not many people who can claim to have been collecting, cooking, and devising recipes for mushrooms for more than sixty years, but Antonio Carluccio is one of them. Carluccio’s interest in mushrooms—his mycological education—began at the age of seven when he went on mushroom hunts with his father and has culminated in his Neal Street Restaurant in London. Today, mushrooms are more popular then ever. Chefs everywhere use these delectable morsels to provide a powerful punch of flavor, without adding many calories or fat. The book begins with a complete field guide, in which forty species are identified with photos. To ensure safety, poisonous look-alike species are also meticulously documented. Then comes a veritable feast of more than 150 mushroom recipes—from classic Italian preparations to Asian-inspired creations and contemporary dishes. Mouthwatering photos accompany each recipe and evoke the earthy sensuality that only mushrooms can bring to the table. In The Complete Mushroom Book, Antonio Carluccio shares the excitement of the hunt and a lifetime of expertise in the kitchen with a new generation of enthusiasts eager to reap the pleasures of cooking with mushrooms.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

More than just a cookbook, Carluccio's exuberant guide to gathering and eating higher fungi is actually both a field guide and a recipe book. The author, who learned to collect wild mushrooms and truffles as a young boy in his native Italy, brought his passion for the "quiet hunt," and for refined gastronomy, with him to London, where he now owns a Covent Garden restaurant that specializes in serving his two favorite delicacies. The first part of Carluccio's book introduces readers to the pleasures of gleaning wild fungi. And it contains not only a fully illustrated catalog of commonly found mushrooms, but also a "code of conduct" for would-be collectors. The author does stress, however, that mushroom collecting cannot be learned from this volume alone and he repeatedly warns readers that their cache of fresh-picked fungi should be looked over by an expert before it is eaten. The book's second section, "The Recipes," is easier to apply at home. In it, readers will find ways to prepare morels, porcini, portabellos, shiitakes and dozens of other edible fungi in soups, salads, and main dishes. Though the book is beautifully designed with elegant color photographs and useful sidebars, it's recipes like Enoki Bundles wrapped with prosciutto and Morels Stuffed with Foi Gras that will keep gourmet cooks turning back to this volume again and again.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Review

This recipe was adapted from The Complete Mushroom Book: The Quiet Hunt by Antonio Carluccio, Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. ($39.95) by Patricia Greathouse, and first published in The New Mexican in October 2006. CREAM OF PORCINI SOUP

(Serves 4)

1 pound fresh porcini (or 1 pound button mushrooms plus 1 ounce dried porcini) 1 medium onion, minced 4 tablespoons olive oil 5 cups beef stock 4 tablespoons heavy or whipping cream Salt and pepper to taste 2 slices white bread 2 tablespoons butter -- The New Mexican August 28, 2007

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Rizzoli Universe Promotional Books (September 12, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0789315130
• ISBN-13: 978-0789315137
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 0.9 x 10.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #926,304 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Feast for the Mycophyle and the Mycophagist, December 29, 2003

By 

B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Complete Mushroom Book: Savory Recipes for Wild and Cultivated Varieties (Hardcover)

This book by an Italian, Antonio Carluccio, transplanted to England covers the botanical classifications of edible mushrooms and fungi, tips on collecting, a guide to identifying edible and toxic mushrooms, and a large collection of mushroom recipes. It has many things to recommend it, but it also should be given more than a cursory thought if you have an interest in purchasing the book.

As a compulsive book collector, I often justify the purchase of a book solely on the presence of one good idea comprising not much more than a page or two, but you may not have such liberal criteria when laying out the long green for a book, especially for bone white plants.

The devil's advocate view of this book is that:

It's coverage of mushroom identification and distinction of culinary from toxic is weak in that the book does not give a consistant photographic coverage to all species. I would be extremely nervous if I knew someone was using only this book as a field guide. A quick comparison photographs for the edible boletus badius on page 33 with the toxic russula emetica on page 71 shows how similar two very different mushrooms can look. The comparison is scarier when you see that the two species flourish at the same time of the year. My main point is that to a non-mycologist, this appears to be a very inadequate field guide. Much better would be one species per page with much more consistant coverage over all species.

While the title of the book refers to all mushrooms, it's emphasis is clearly on wild mushrooms. About 75 percent of all the recipes call for wild mushrooms, primarily morels and many of the recipes calling for cultivated species call for unusual or expensive species, up to and including truffles.

So what does that leave for the non-mushroom hunter living in Brooklyn? Here are some reasons for buying this book:

The well written text and good photography provides a worthy vicarious experience of the thrills of mushroom hunting in Devon, England.

The recipes give several worthy methods for preserving mushrooms, including drying and pickling. This is the material I would pick to primarily justify the purchase. I have not seen it anywhere else.

Even if you substitute the humble Pennsylvania button mushroom or the slightly more upscale cremini for the blue stocking morels and procinis, you get a wealth of recipes to add to a vegetarian diet. The recipes draw heavily from French and Italian cuisine, but they include a broad selection from various oriental cuisines as well. Even a fair number of German and Spanish dishes are included. Oddly, there seems to be practically no recipes for the portobello.

You also get useful practical tips on handling and eating mushrooms. The book makes it clear that almost every mushroom is healthier to eat cooked than to eat raw. I have heard it said that even our darling little Kennet Square button mushrooms have toxins which must be cooked to remove the toxins. Give the raw mushrooms a pass the next time you hit the salad bar. The information on taking special care with raw mushrooms and alcohol is pretty chilling, but again, as testified by the long popularity of Coq au Vin, this danger is eliminated by thorough cooking.

In general, I would rate the culinary advice on mushroom technique to be very useful.

Since I am very fond of cookbooks on single subjects, I recommend this book for the recipes and techniques and background on mushroom culture and collection in the wild, as long as you keep the wild part to your armchair. The price is a bit high, so I would not click on the order button without some check on alternate titles, especially the volume by Jane Grigson, `The Mushroom Feast' which I have not yet had the pleasure to sample.

4.0 out of 5 stars Comments on "Complete Mushroom Book- by Antonio Carluccio, October 19, 2010

By 

TOMMY - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Complete Mushroom Book: Savory Recipes for Wild and Cultivated Varieties (Hardcover)

Very well written book....great pictures of most mushrooms and their edibility...
The author is certainly an expert in this area...
Also got some great recipes out of this book.....

5.0 out of 5 stars Five fungi, October 2, 2010

By 

Peter Smith "ptrsmith" (Camden, ME United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Complete Mushroom Book: Savory Recipes for Wild and Cultivated Varieties (Hardcover)

Antonio Carluccio is clearly an aficionado, from collecting to preparing, he shows us how to honor the magic of fungi. This is not just a cookbook, the first half of the book covers foraging and collecting, with clear descriptions and pictures of each mushroom and it's troublesome look alikes. The second half is devoted to great recipes designed to really show off each mushroom's particular flavor and texture. Rare is the chef who can throttle back his "chops" to let the delicate flavor of each fungi be the star. "If you can't taste it, you waste it" does not apply to Carluccio's recipes.
As a 15+ year forager and obsessed amateur chef, I feel confident in recommending this book highly to anyone who wants to know how to get the most out of their mushrooms.