Portobello, cremini, shiitake, and enoki mushrooms -- and even morels and chanerelles -- are showing up in supermarkets and specialty stores these days. Advances in mushroom cultivation have made vareities that were once available only to experienced mushroom hunters now easy for everyone to find, and a numberof mail-order sources provide more exotic kinds.

But what should a cook do with all these mushroom varieties? How do you bring out their most distinctive characteristics in the kitchen? In A Cook's Book of Mushrooms, Jack Czarnecki chief proprietor of Joe's Restaurant in Reading, Pennsylvania, provides the answers. Czarnecki gives an account of his life-long fascination with mushrooms -- hunting them, cooking them, and eating them. He describes the characteristics of the principal edible mushrooms and provides a collection of tasty recipes for using these "wild" mushrooms that are now available commercially, as well as for more exotic mushrooms.