Scarlet elf cupSarcoscypha coccinea

Not in any culinary sense. The flesh is very thin, gelatinous and tasteless. Some sources allow it in soups as a striking decoration for color, but there's no serious interest in it. Better not to taste it raw — some sensitive people may get mild stomach upset.

It contains no serious toxins — it isn't among Ukraine's deadly poisonous mushrooms. But as with all wild mushrooms, don't taste it raw, and cooked it has no value.

On fallen, rotting twigs of broadleaf trees — beech, hornbeam, willow, hazel, less often oak. Especially in shady damp spots, river floodplains and along streams. Look not on bare soil but on the leaf litter among moss and fallen twigs.

The Carpathians (Zakarpattia, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Chernivtsi regions), the Carpathian foothills, Polissia and the northern Forest-Steppe. It isn't found in the dry steppe — it needs constant moisture and organic leaf litter.

February–May, peaking in March–April. It's a true spring mushroom — one of the very first, appearing right after the snow melts. In warm winters in Zakarpattia it can turn up as early as late January. By summer it's gone completely.

With Sarcoscypha austriaca — practically identical on the outside, but it grows a little later and on alder and willow twigs. You can only tell them apart under a microscope, by spore shape. In the kitchen and in ecology they're almost the same.

There are no serious poisonous lookalikes in Ukraine. A bright red cup on the forest floor in March–April is almost always Sarcoscypha. There are no other bright red cup fungi this season.

For its shape — a perfect tiny red bowl, like something out of a fairy tale about elves. It's a folk name in many European languages: the English say "scarlet elf cup" or "fairy cup", the Germans "Zinnoberroter Kelchbecherling" (cinnabar-red cup). The Ukrainian "лісова чарка" ("forest goblet") means the same thing.