I recently stayed with a friend living in Epernay, in France's Champagne region. As she and her husband like to eat and I love to cook, we stayed in for all our meals. Before I arrived, they stocked their fridge with artichokes, tomatoes, tiny, sweet plums and a kilo each of chanterelles and cepes. That's a lot of mushrooms.

I started cleaning them the way I was taught - by gently brushing off the soil. My friend didn't have a mushroom brush, though, so I had to use a pastry brush that was too soft. It would have taken hours to clean them this way so I filled the sink with water, dumped in a few handfuls of mushrooms and gave them a quick rinse. It almost felt as if I were committing a culinary faux pas because I've heard over and over again that mushrooms absorb water like a sponge.

Therefore I was happy to see Harold McGee addressing the subject of cleaning mushrooms in his book The Curious Cook. The food scientist weighed some mushrooms, let them soak in water for a few minutes, blotted them, then weighed them again. The amount of water they absorbed was minuscule. He writes that mushrooms are made up mostly of water anyway, so what does it matter if they absorb a tiny bit more? According to McGee, the rin- sing should be done just before the mushrooms are cooked.