A Kashmiri rice dish built around rare gucchi morels rehydrated in their own fragrant liquor, layered with whole spices, three-cornered garlic and a careful pinch of saffron. The mushrooms do the heavy lifting: earthy, meaty, faintly smoky. A dish reserved for occasions in the Valley.

Gucchi (morchella esculenta, the morel mushroom) is the Kashmiri culinary treasure that grows wild in the alpine meadows above the Valley floor, harvested by villagers in early spring and dried for use through the rest of the year. The dried morels can sell for more than $1000 a kilogram; a small handful is enough to perfume a whole rice dish for a family of six.

The rehydration liquor is liquid gold. Cover the dried morels in warm water for thirty minutes; the resulting broth is deep brown, intensely savoury, and forms the cooking liquid for the rice. Strain it through a fine sieve to catch any grit (morels grow in pine-needle forests and always carry some debris).

Three-cornered garlic (the wild allium that grows in early spring across temperate Eurasia) is the Kashmiri foundational aromatic, used as the green allium in much the same way that spring onion is used in Chinese cooking or scallion in Korean. Substitute spring onion or wild garlic if you can't find the real thing. Saffron from the Kashmir-grown threads (the most prized variety in the world), bloomed in warm milk and stirred through the rice at the end. Serve as a centrepiece for a Kashmiri feast.