Every cook in our part of Istria had her own version of wild mushroom soup. This one was devised by my Great Aunt Santola, a widow, who cooked the soup for the whole courtyard at Busoler. She would come home and pick over the mushrooms she had gathered, separating those to be sauteed from those earmarked for other uses. Mostly trimmings and stems were reserved for her soup. When I was old enough to begin gathering my own mushrooms, I was allowed to pick only the unmistakably safe varieties, like champignons and porcini, and forbidden to eat any before my aunt approved them. The traditional belief was that the poisonous mushrooms could be detected by cooking them in water with a piece of brass; if the brass turned green, the mushrooms were unsafe. As a further precaution, the oldest woman in a household had the dubious honor of tasting the mushrooms before they were served to other members of the family

Click for recipe