The first comes from Roger Phillips’ seminal book “Wild Food.” That book contains a recipe for Jew’s ear rolls, which are basically “swiss rolls” made from soft, sliced white bread with a jew’s ear, garlic and herb filling.
I’m not going to provide any recipes here, but I can point readers in the general direction of two culinary uses. Plenty more were coming through, so I decided to pick a large bagful and experiment with it, there being very little else in the way of edible fungi available right now (though this is going to change in the very near future when the warmer weather finally arrives from tomorrow onwards.) There are no similar poisonous species, so this one is reasonably safe for beginners to collect (although not entirely foolproof – I saw somebody get it wrong on the internet last year.)Īnd experimentation may well be required if you’re going to do anything culinary with it. I found quite a bit of it around Christmas and New Year, but haven’t seen much of it since then, until two days ago, when I found this lot. This is the second fruiting of this year. One of those times is right now, at least in my home territory of Sussex. Jew’s ear is very common and can sometimes be found in vast quantities. Auricularia polytricha, known in China as “wood ear” or “cloud ear”, and in Japan as kikurage or “tree jellyfish”, is taxonomically distinct, but there is no important difference from a culinary or medicinal point of view.īumper haul of Jew’s Ear (Auricularia auricula-judae) The naming situation is further complicated by the fact that although this particular species has never been widely consumed in its home territory of northern Europe, it has a close relative which is an important culinary and medicinal species in several south-east Asian countries, especially China. I shall continue to call this fungus “Jew’s ear.” If other people want to call it “jelly ear” then that’s up to them. If people have a problem with the anti-Semitic nature and history of Christianity, then I suggest they take it up with their local church, or maybe the Archbishop of Canterbury. This it may be, but it is not the place of the BMS to get involved in such issues. If this is going to be considered anti-Semitic then the whole Christian religion must be considered anti-Semitic. Judas Iscariot was a Jew, and the mythology in question is an integral part of the Christian religion – this species is found most frequently on elder trees, either dead or alive, and it was an elder tree from which Judas supposedly hung himself. I see no reason to believe this has anything to do with anti-Semitism. My own view concurs with that of mycologist Patrick Harding – that this an abuse of the English language and that the BMS should be concerned with fungi, not politics, religion or the evolution of the English language. This species was a special case, because it was the only one where the motivation was that of political correctness, the claim being that “Jew’s ear” is anti-Semitic. Where possible there was also an attempt to make them more taxonomically consistent, although this has only been partially successful due to many changes in latin names due to advances in our understanding of fungal taxonomy as a result of widespread genetic testing. In 2003 the British Mycological Society published a new list of common names for fungi, and in most cases the motivation where there was a new (or newly “official”) name was either to provide a common name for species that had none or to select one common name for species that had several. There has recently been an attempt to change this common name. Jew’s Ear (Auricularia auricula-judae), mid-April.
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