There has been panic behind the scenes about our chances of finding mushrooms at Eridge Park today, but the fungi man himself, Antonio Carluccio, is unconcerned. It has been raining intermittently for a couple of days, which is good, and there has been some warmth, too. So, armed with a basket, a sharp knife and a carved stick topped with an image of his signature porcino, he strides across the land behind Lord Abergavenny’s Kent home.

“Mushrooms are my passion,” Carluccio declares. “There’s a silence in the woods, you see nature and you’re looking for something that is elusive and delightful to eat.”

There is something poetic about the Italian chef’s delivery, and something surreal about today’s event. He is followed not only by the Earl and Countess of Abergavenny, but also by a gaggle of ex-military men who have come to Kent to watch the mushroom master at work. All have known troubled times since they left the Forces and have found support from the Warrior Programme, a charity that has helped them to piece their lives together. This is the third time that Carluccio has volunteered to support them, and today he is in his element as, having hunted for mushrooms for 65 years, since he was 7, he has a good idea of where to look.

He leads us to a tree surrounded by what look like large frilly cowpats. “Now this is something very juicy and nice,” he says, lifting one of them. Beneath it is a honeycoloured growth, which he cuts away. “Giant polypore,” he notes. “Lovely. A month old, at least. This would be good with anything.” It goes in the basket. “Pungent, innit?” says one of the warriors.

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The next find is a tiny thing, its head no bigger than a small fingernail, on a slender stem. A magic mushroom, Carluccio explains, but you’d need a lot of them to feel the effect, “and we are not here for dreaming today or making trips”.

He moves on to what seems to be a bright orange chanterelle, but it is known as the false one, and Carluccio advises not to eat its stem. The next find is rejected because it goes black when he cuts it and would provoke a stomach upset if eaten: “There are 200,000 mushrooms, of which 2,000 are edible, 200 very edible and only 20 poisonous. So we are relatively safe.”

He drools over two parasol mushrooms with their speckled heads on tall stems, then peels some birch betula on the spot to lose the grit. Don’t wash mushrooms, he advises, take off the dirt with a knife or dust it off, as he does with a brush on the handle of his knife. And then, joy of joys, he takes us to a maple tree and we look up to see dinner-plate-sized slabs of pale mushrooms spilling out of seams where there were once branches. “Dryad’s saddle,” Carluccio says. We taste slivers, getting a muscular texture, a cucumber flavour and a slightly bitter aftertaste.

“Could do with a fry-up,” says a warrior.

Carluccio obliges in the estate’s tiny cricket pavilion, where he commandeers a couple of camping gas rings. For lunch we have his mushroom haul fried with garlic in unsalted butter and served with scrambled eggs and focaccia. Delicious.

So what has all this been about? More than mushrooms, surely. Many of the warriors have been homeless, most have suffered depression. Getting into the countryside, focusing on mushrooms and a fine chef’s patter, has lifted them and reinforces the sense of community between them, they say. “Antonio has been a great friend. There is a lot of empathy,” Patrick Lyster-Todd, who served for 20 years in the Royal Navy, says. “You can learn to put your problems to one side and realise you can achieve the things you once dreamt of.”

Andrew Ralphs, who served in Northern Ireland for three years, has been unable to settle outside the Army and draws confidence from seeing Carluccio at work. “I didn’t think we’d find many mushrooms,” Ralphs says, “and it’s good to see how simple good cooking can be.”

Nick Eccles, who served in the Falklands, says that the day has been “an absolute pleasure considering the years I was living on the streets”. He added: “Today makes me feel human and wanted.”

Carluccio is having a cigarette at the back of the pavilion. “When someone comes back from war without a limb, you can see what they need,” he says. “It is much harder to look into someone’s mind when that is what has been damaged. Having suffered depression myself over 20 years, coinciding with the building-up of my restaurant chain, I can imagine what goes on in these guys’ heads, and it’s important for them to rejoin normal thinking and activities.”

He adds: “Usually, we look at things superficially, accept them as they seem to be. Hunting for mushrooms shows that, if you go deeper, you can find things you didn’t know were there.”

warriorprogramme.org.uk

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