To serve with the Gumbo have a dish of perfectly cooked rice. You may use the same general formula for Crab or Oyster Gumbo. A Combination Salad is about the only thing worth serving with Gumbo. Although you might wash it down with a bottle of PRE-WAR IMPORTED CLARET—HELP!!!!
XCI
John Taintor Foote
MORELS SAUTÉ
There is a dish—a gastronomical ecstasy—the faintest conception of which is magnificently beyond the pen. The fork is the one utensil that can convey to the uninitiated the unique, the utterly sublime flavor of Morels sauté.
A Morel is—in the vernacular of the countryside—a sponge mushroom. It is to be found in ancient, unplowed orchards during the pastel phase of spring when apple trees blossom and bees zoom and bumble and hum in a languid shower of pink and white petals.
Close to a girthy apple tree, scabrous with age, pock-marked by the bills of countless woodpeckers, the Morels, now and then—alas, it is only now and then—poke up through the cold, damp, chocolate-colored earth and flourish shyly for a fortnight or so.
A full day’s tramping through orchard after orchard may win perhaps two dozen of these tiny sponges that have absorbed the very essence of spring. They are almost the exact color of the matted, winter-killed grass in which they nestle to defy all but the most careful searching. A full day’s work for each two dozen, but never was a day’s wage more ample, more exquisitely satisfying.