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Located in the town of Washington, Virginia, in the eastern foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and surrounded by the lush, verdant Shenandoah National Park forest, chef Patrick O’Connell has for over 46 years run one of America’s greatest restaurants, The Inn at Little Washington.
With three Michelin stars and a clientele that come from all over the world, O’Connell’s culinary achievements sit at the very pinnacle of American fine dining, but perhaps, even more impressive, is that O’Connell has found a place where he belongs, a landscape that speaks to him and a forest that he can call home.
Here, in this spectacularly green and pleasant corner of the US, among the almost virginal deciduous forest, O’Connell waits patiently for spring. It is when the meadows burst into life, with a thick blanket of wildflowers and the forest bears the gift the locals have been waiting for, the morel mushroom.
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“This season is one of our favorite times of year,” says O’Connell. “Especially when the morels come, they have a kind of cult status here. I compare it to how the Europeans regard the hunt for truffles.”
Just like the truffle hunters in Italy jealously guard their secret hunting grounds, so too do the locals of Washington keep their ‘spots’ a closely kept secret. Getting a local hunter to show where the morels grow is virtually impossible.
“I remember when I was doing my first cookbook and I had a photographer out from Chicago and he really wanted to get a shot of somebody actually picking the morel in the forest,” says O’Connell. “We asked our local guide if he could help us get this shot of someone picking the morel. He said, ‘I ain’t showing nobody my spot’. Eventually we made a deal: for $50, he let the photographer sit in the back of his pickup truck, blindfolded, and drove him around in the wrong direction for a while before taking him there.”
Even if you are lucky enough to find one of the much-prized morel spots, there’s no guarantee you’ll find any. They are elusive mushrooms. You can look hard in the area and find nothing; you must get down on your hands and knees and get a closer look. The best places to find morels in this part of the world are abandoned apple orchards, where no spray has been on the trees for years. This is apple country, but you must find an orchard that hasn’t been maintained. The morel is, in a way, the expression of a respectful dialogue between man and the forest, a symbiotic relationship.
“The reason the apple orchards work is because they have been cleared to raise the apple trees,” says O’Connell. “It’s no longer a dense forest, so the dappled sunlight penetrates and reaches down to the forest floor and warms it just enough to create the right conditions, under the old trees.”
Over five and a half decades, O’Connell has come to know the land intimately here, he knows the forest and some of the morel spots and he knows the locals. “I’m almost accepted,” he laughs.
And through the years he has changed a lot since when, as a 21-year-old drifter, sometime around the Summer of Love, unhappy with the direction the world was going in, he happened upon this untouched piece of paradise. It was a place where he could live a simple existence and reconnect with the land.
“At that point working in a restaurant was not considered an acceptable option for someone who has other abilities but that was what I found most stimulating,” says O’Connell.
“I had a friend who was living off the land, he had been in a monastery here in Berryville and had decided he wanted to leave. The bishop told him that he had a little hermitage in West Virginia, so he went there. He would live in a cabin and not speak to anyone for a whole year and live off the land.
“Everything was suspect at the time; it was the height of the Vietnam War. We had become very suspicious of politicians; we were somewhat disillusioned. The only thing we could trust then was food, particularly if you grew it yourself.
“I remember at the time, people saying ‘Whose garden did these peas come from?’ You didn’t only want to know that they were fresh or beautiful, but you wanted to know who planted those peas.
“This area lends itself perfectly with getting back in touch with nature and I just felt it was my spot in the world and I belonged here, and everything just fell into place. I was lucky because I realized cooking was my passion. Julia Child’s book had come on the scene. I had a fire engine red cooking stove that kept the cabin warm, and my hobby was just cooking my way through her books. In the afternoon we would go to the local library in the next town because they had central heating, and I would spend the afternoon reading very old cookbooks. It just became an obsessive pursuit.”
Known across the US as ‘The Pope of American Cuisine’, O’Connell’s status as a legend of the American kitchen is assured. He cuts a sage and dignified figure today as an internationally lauded chef of a three-Michelin-starred restaurant and recipient of the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award. But O’Connell is a self-taught chef, driven to excellence by his own passion for cooking and the young radical’s urge to reconnect with nature through food. The Inn at Little Washington reflects both his love of the classical, in culinary technique, but also in how the restaurant is presented, and a playful irreverence that encourages his guests to have fun.
This approach is reflected in how he cooks the morels that arrive in his kitchen too. Alongside classics there are more surprising ways they are used in dishes.
“One of my favorites is a morel pizza,” says O’Connell. “So instead of using a tomato sauce, we first make a puree of the morel and we spread that on the bottom of the pizza crust. We sauté morels with shallots and garlic, and we spread them across the top of the pizza and sprinkle fontina and parmesan cheese over the top, slather it with olive oil and bake it on a stone. It’s wonderfully crispy and incredibly addictive.
“We make a morel fettuccine and garnish it with some tips of asparagus, that’s one of our go-to dishes. There’s also a morel risotto, which is everybody’s favorite too, you add tips of asparagus or peas for color and texture. We make a nice morel gnocchi, but even something as simple as a morel quiche is just amazing, they’re so versatile.”
Thankfully, this season has been exceptional. With the first ones that arrived described as ‘gargantuan’. The most prized are known as the ‘blondes’, a very light ivory in color and more delicate in flavor, this year they have been plentiful.
“The first thing we did this year was we stuffed them,” says O’Connell. They adapt well to stuffing, so we stuffed them with beautiful Maryland crab meat. I also stuff them with snails and snail butter. That’s exciting because you feel like the snail is living inside your motel. It’s kind of magical.”
O’Connell has been around this part of the world long enough to remember a time before the effects of global warming became all too apparent.
“I remember 20 years ago when people would show up with pickup trucks filled with cardboard boxes of morels, more than we could use,” he says. “They’re very sensitive mushrooms, so if you have two or three days above 80°F, it can wipe out a whole harvest. As more land gets developed and people inhabit new land, we lose patches. Fortunately, the Park is protected.”
Older people will pass on their morel spots to the next generation. In this area, fewer and fewer people are hunting for them. It used to be that the local guides would know where to go and find them, but it’s little by little dying out and the price is going up. O’Connell is determined to make the most of them while they’re here and what he loves most is to do an all-morel menu with morels featuring in every course. This mushroom through, is part of local heritage in Washington, VA, and there is a tradition of how they are cooked and preserved.
“Most people here make what they call ‘gravy’ with them. We used to kind of look down on it, but it’s a wonderful use of them,” says O’Connell. “They dust the morel with flour, dip them in an egg batter, and then back in the flour and sauté them, probably in Crisco, I don’t know. Then they add some beef stock or venison stock to the pan, the morels are twice or three times the size at this point with all the batter. They simmer them for a while until they have this wonderful flavor. Then they can them in mason jars, so they have this morel ‘gravy’ that they can put on venison or whatever all through the winter.”
There is a long and ancient relationship with the morel in this part of the world. It must be preserved, and the National Park protection is a good start. But the cultural and naturalistic significance of these mushrooms needs to be shared far and wide. This chef is doing just that.
When O’Connell speaks of the morels and the forest that surround his haven, The Inn at Little Washington, there is almost a mysticism in his reverence for them. They are the gifts of the forest, the offering for a respectful relationship with nature. But there is also clearly much left of that 21-year-old radical, who wants to connect with the land, but also who just wants to have fun and cook.
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