The morel of the story

The most expensive vegetable in India, a delicacy for vegetarians, is a type of mushroom. But are they worth the high price that vegetarians pay for them?

- VIR SANGHVI

For years and years, if you asked chefs and caterers which vegetable Indian vegetarians would not eat, the answer was always the same: Mushrooms.

Guests thought they were poisonous, we were told. Some would only eat canned mushrooms, horrible little buttons that had turned a nasty shade of brown in the brine in which they were soaked. Fresh mushrooms were strictly a no-no.

A decade ago, when I was invited to an Air India food tasting, I asked the chef who ran the flight kitchen why he did not do something more interesting with the vegetarian options, which were restricted to several kinds of paneer. Why not mushrooms?

I was told that this was out of the question. Passengers would not eat them. The Air India catering team had experimented with mushrooms on the in-flight menu, but nobody touched them.

Fortunately, this has finally begun to change. But it has always intrigued me that even during the period when vegetarians would not eat mushrooms, there were always two exceptions.

The first was the black mushroom of Chinese cooking. Vegetarians would not necessarily order shiitake, but if they saw one used in a dish they had ordered, they would not scream 'poison'!