Enfleurage

The cold (actually room temperature) extraction of scent into oil. I had to reread Perfume to figure out the process. My only experiments previously in extracting oil had been in cold-pressing walnut oil, which were mostly a failure (I spent several days for a little over an ounce of usable product) but failure has always been a prod for me. I'd had Rush Welding make a shallow stainless steel pan, with turned-up edges, that fit into a book-binding press, I had some unbleached muslin, I had a surplus of bay leaves, plenty of olive oil, and I'd bought some large sheets of butcher paper because with the walnut oil I'd made a hell of a mess. I like to do something during the Easter Recess. You can easily extract bay leaf scent by just putting some in a jar of oil, then filtering, but I wanted a concentrate. I spread out newspaper (I get my newspaper from the recycling center) then butcher paper, then a square of muslin that's been soaked in olive oil, then layer leaves and fold, then let it sit at room temperature for six hours (in the stainless steel pan), then slowly squeeze the mass in the press. No idea what I'm going to do with this. It might be nice added to the oil used to fry mussels or some other seafood. Joel calls from Atlanta and he wants some dried morels, says that they're incredibly expensive on line, hundreds of dollars a pound, and he offers barter, books and rare cheeses. It's difficult for me to get a pound ahead but I assure him I'll try. Joel says it's greed, that prevents me from sharing. And I guess it's true, at least as far as morels are concerned. I've lived in this house for 17 years (a record for me) and probably seven of those years, as long as I limit myself to one mushroom meal a day, during the season, I've eaten them daily. Maybe forty or fifty days. The season ends for me when the rattlesnakes emerge. Nothing staunches my desire for morels more completely than coming within a few feet of a sunning rattlesnake. One patch, later than the others, a north facing area over near the graveyard, I seldom get to harvest, because there's a snake den in one of the graves. There's another patch, on the opposite ridge, that I don't get to that often, because it means a hike through serious tick country. B and I were cooking a whole leg of lamb for his clan, marinated in hot peppers and blackberry juice, a couple of years ago, and Jenny, the naturalist, had wandered off with one of the kids. When they came back, they had a huge bag of morels. But for my meager needs, a meal a day, I just harvest near the house. The season of plenty, asparagus gone wild, cat-tail shoots, and bitter tender greens. A vinaigrette with bay oil.