Mushroom market in Villefranche du Perigord

AS the church clock struck four in the afternoon the market opened for the sale of the day’s cèpe mushrooms.

The large, bun-like cèpes were all neatly stacked in wooden crates with official tickets detailing their weight and the sellers attentively stood by.

Villefranche du Perigord, in the southern Dordogne, is renowned for its cèpe market and people come from miles around to buy and sell the mushrooms.

And as people moved from one seller to the next bargaining over the price, deals were struck and crates carried off to cars and vans.

Earlier in the day locals will have been out in the surrounding woods collecting the mushrooms keen to get them to the market as fresh as possible.

Most people know the best places to head for and can collect a few kilograms in a couple of hours.

By mid-afternoon people begin to gather in the village square and they bring their mushrooms to the scales to have them officially weighed.

Then each seller will place their crates on the stone floor beneath the old wooden roof of the covered market.

As four o’clock approaches more and more people arrive unloading their cars and quickly find a spot so they can sell them to the growing crowd.

An hour or so later and the market drifts to a close with €15 being the average price for a kilo, but some of the more experienced sellers have seen prices as high as €35 a kilo.

Within French kitchens the cèpe is one of the most popular edible fungi and is equally revered by chefs in the country’s finest restaurants.

And there is no doubt that they are a delicacy as fortunately in the morning I spotted one of the self-same brown capped mushrooms, with its distinctive yellowish underbelly, in a wood nearby.

I sliced it up and fried it in a little butter and chopped garlic, letting it go a golden brown colour before eating it with crusty bread.

So if you go down into the woods today, make sure you are back by four.

View a gallery of photos from the Villefranche du Perigord cèpe market.