Sautéed Porcini Mushrooms with Shallots

Like Michel Goldberg, Natan Holchaker was a little boy during the Nazi occupation. When the war started, his father moved to a small village in the Dordogne with a little garden and a well. One day his father told him to “disappear,” and he and his brother left to live with peasants in the countryside. Two days later, the Germans attacked. Throughout the war, he and his brother lived on farms, helping to pick crops and learning how to find porcini mushrooms, which they gathered for the farmers. This delicious recipe comes from Natan and his wife, Josiane Torrès-Holchaker. Josiane’s ancestors came to Bordeaux from Portugal in the sixteenth century. Although they lived outwardly as Marranos, or New Christians, the Torrès-Vedras family continued to live as Jews at home. In 1790, the National Assembly decreed that all the Portuguese and Spanish Jews in France would enjoy the rights of active citizens. As we were driving with Natan and Josiane toward the Médoc wine country in Bordeaux, they suddenly stopped the car, jumped out, and looked at the cèpes (porcini mushrooms) that were being sold by the road. They were so excited, as only the French can be, in anticipation of cooking the mushrooms. “See how fresh these are,” said Josiane. “They are shiny and white, the cap is closed, and they aren’t green inside, a sign of their being too old.” She told me that sometimes she just serves the mushrooms raw, dicing and marinating them first in lemon juice. Then she described the way her mother prepared porcini.