Mycophilia Page 4

  Historically, fungi had been organized into two groups: edible and poisonous. It was the Swedish mycologist Elias Magnus Fries (1794-1878) who organized mushrooms based on morphology—their size, shape, color, surface features, odor, gills or pores, stem, veil (a membrane connecting the cap to the stem), spore color, habitat, and so on. His system was modified over time, and in the 1950s mycologists like Rolf Singer reworked his classifications. Nevertheless, most of Fries’s genera are holding up quite well under the scrutiny of molecular biology (DNA analyses and the ability to identify the relationships between different fungi by their genes).

  Mycologists use the same scientific classification system as all the other biological disciplines: life, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. Within the kingdom of fungi there are seven phyla or subkingdoms, classifications based on their reproductive structures (which can lead to some very disparate fungi, like white button mushrooms and the rusts that attack wheat, being classed together). The higher fungi—those with the most obvious and complex fruiting bodies, including most of the mushrooms we find in the woods—belong to two phyla. The Asco-mycota, which include morels and truffles, produce spores in sacks and are called cup fungi, and the Basidiomycota, like button mushrooms and porcini, produce spores on tiny structures that look like little baseball bats. Actually, the Basidiomycota are the true mushroom fungi. Technically, mycologists don’t call the fruiting bodies of Ascomycota mushrooms (in fact, they don’t use the term mushroom at all, not when talking science), but everyone does in common usage. Ascomycota tend to be smaller, and there are more species, but most are molds and yeasts. Some molds are known as Fungi Imperfecti—and are classified as Deuteromycetes, a kind of dumping ground for fungi whose sexual cycle is not yet known.

  Fungi are named by genus first, like Boletus, then the species, satanas, always in Latin or Latinized, and italicized in print. Often the names are descriptive, as in Trametes versicolor (trametes = one who is thin; versicolor = variously colored), and in print, the name or initials of the mycologist who first described the mushrooms (and published that description)* may follow: Fr for Fries, L for Linnaeus, AHS for Smith, and Fuck for Fuckel. Many mushrooms have common names as well, like hen of the woods, but these are problematic, as people from different regions will use different common names: Hen of the woods, for example, is also known as ram’s head or sheep’s head. It’s generally best to use the scientific names because they are the same wherever in the world you find the mushroom.

  Determining the phyla and genus of a fungus based on morphological characteristics has its limitations when it comes to describing the microscopic majority of fungi. Genetic taxonomy has helped mycologists identify many more fungi than just those that produce large fruiting bodies. And it turns out some mushrooms that don’t look at all alike are actually closely related, like a morel and a truffle. “It’s like finding out a whale is more closely related to a cow than a fish,” said the mycologist David Hibbet. (On the other hand, the theoretical biologist Lynn Margulis argues that leaning too heavily on genetics to identify organisms is a slippery slope. “Even if there were identical gene sequences in the bark of a banana tree and the skin of a dog, we would still classify a dog not with a banana but with wolves and jackals.”) Mycologists are currently shifting species into different genera like crazy, and all current taxonomy utilizes DNA analyses.

  “It’s like early-onset Alzheimer’s,” said Gary Lincoff. “By the time I’m 80, I’m not going to know any mushroom names at all.”

  Mycological festivals and forays tend to focus on more technical presentations during the day, like taxonomy, and jazzier stuff at night. SOMA camp was no different. During the evening, I attended a lecture by Gary Lincoff, a top biller on the foray circuit. I’d overheard him at dinner telling a companion, “I was at the movies the other day and I realized there was nothing about mushrooms in the film. It was as if the actors didn’t even know mushrooms exist!” Lincoff, who is known in mushroom circles as the Woody Allen of mycology, is probably most famous for having written The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms, in which his editors insisted he invent loads of common names for mushrooms that didn’t have them. At his lecture, he told us that when he was writing his field guide, he sat around at night with his friends, looking at slides and coming up with common names. One picture was of a mushroom that was orange on the outside and white on the inside. It looked like a boiled lobster, and so he called it the lobster mushroom. I’d always assumed the lobster mushroom tasted like fish.

  I also attended a presentation by Elio Schaechter, gentleman microbiologist, who showed rather disgusting slides of fungal infestations of the body (tongue, toenails, scalp) and then flattered me immensely by holding my hand gently during another mycologist’s lecture on mold.

  Throughout the weekend, we met enthusiasts of all sorts; earth mothers and hot young chefs and men of the wood-chopping, outdoorsy variety who thought Arlene and I were troopers for traveling so far. We ate mixed wild mushroom tacos that night and drank some of the great wines of Sonoma and traded business cards with other mycophiles, fully intending to keep in touch.

  Back in New York, I dried the candy caps (they are used fresh in savory dishes, dried in sweet dishes) and froze them in glass Ball jars. Over the course of the following year, I prepared them many ways, but the dish that best evoked the place where I found them was baked apples, a few of the mushrooms pressed into the flesh of each apple before it was topped with butter and cinnamon. The apples were mapley and mushroomy at the same time, as woodsy and sweet and delightful as anything I’ve ever eaten, and not just because of their fine, unusual flavor but also because they came from a grove of redwoods on the edge of a forest through which I could see the great blue.

  When I told my husband, Kevin, I was planning a camping trip with Wild About Mushrooms, a late spring morel and porcini mushroom hunting foray in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, he got a little glum. He’d been trying to get me to camp with him for 20 years, and except for one time when we camped at the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado and I spent the night slowly sliding down the dune in my sleeping bag, I’d always declined. But here I was, after maxing out my credit card at EMS, heading west to hunt mushrooms with David Campbell, a well-known California-based mushroom hunter who collects for personal and commercial purposes, and his crew.

  The Mushroom Man story is a perennial in regional newspapers: A local mycologically savvy fellow or gal with a silly moniker like Fungus Bob or Wolf the Mushroom Man, or Wildman Steve Brill (who works the parks in New York City), is leading a group on a foray, where he/she will explain the joys and hazards of mushrooming.* David doesn’t have a tag, but he is definitely well known on the northern California mushroom scene. He certainly looks the part of a mountain man: Tall and bearded, he has that aloof, hooded-eye quality of someone who might just leave you in the woods if you piss him off. For decades he has been an obsessed wild mushroom enthusiast and sometime commercial picker, wandering the mountains to collect morels, porcini, chanterelles, and matsutake, among others, which he has sold to chefs and mushroom distributors. A former president of the Mycological Society of San Francisco, David has volunteered at the local poison control center for the past 15 years and led forays for paying clients like myself, affably sharing both his prime picking spots and his favorite wines. “At this point I’m in it to educate people,” he told me.

  David is used to people like me nagging him to identify every anonymous-looking brown mushroom in the woods, which I’ve come to learn is rather bad manners. (It’s a bit like leaning too heavily on your Spanish-speaking companion while traveling in Mexico. One should at least try to learn a few words.) The identity of many mushrooms is absolutely obvious to someone like David, who said that after a while differentiating between two mushrooms is like telling the difference between an artichoke and an asparagus. The most commonly reported mushroom “poisonings” are not poisonings at all but the result
of panic reactions when someone eats a mushroom they’ve picked, then, on second thought, questions their identification, setting off a series of dramatic symptoms.

  To wit: I usually hunt porcini during the summer in Colorado where I have a cabin, but one year I got skunked. Fearing I’d have no fungi to haul back to New York, I turned in desperation to Yvon Gros, a French chef who owns the Leroux Creek Winery in Hotchkiss, Colorado, and always finds mushrooms. I’d been begging him for years to show me his spots—even got him drunk a couple of times and then hit him up for his locations, but Yvon can hold his tongue and his liquor. That year, however, he owed me quite a few dinners, and I could sense the weakening that only guilt can bring. He promised to take me to the Grand Mesa a few days before we were to return to the city.

  The Grand Mesa, in western Colorado, is the largest flat-topped mountain in the continental United States. At about 10,000 feet, it is covered with lakes, streams, and pine forests. National park access roads crisscross the summit, giving remote access to recreationists of all sorts. We piled up in Yvon’s truck: his wife, Joanna, and my husband, Kevin, and we headed up, up, up. We were at the very top of the mountain when Yvon hit the brakes.

  “Ah, beautiful,” he said in his French accent. All over the mossy bank, pocketed between gray rocks, were a hundred clusters of young white mushrooms. I didn’t recognize them but Yvon was ecstatic. “Oooh, these are wonderful in the ohm-let!” But what were they called? “Spa … Spo … something. It is related to the oyster. Ah! What does it matter? They are delicious. But only when very young, like these.”

  The mushrooms smelled appetizing: clean and earthy. We collected at least 6 glorious pounds, fantasizing about all the ways we were going to cook our haul. But that evening, Kevin and I had a dinner engagement and had to leave the mushrooms for processing later.

  The next morning was our packing day, with a million things to do. Before committing a couple of hours to cleaning and cooking and freezing the mushrooms, Kevin decided a positive identification was in order and got out the books: the National Audubon Society’s field guide and Mushrooms of Colorado and the Southern Rocky Mountains. He put his finger right on it: Clitocybe dilatata. Edibility: poisonous. We called Yvon.

  “But I ate a pound of them last night and I feel excellent,” he said. Kevin told him to go to page 746 of Lincoff’s book. There was a long pause. “I’ll have to get back to you,” he said.

  Yvon called poison control, and was put on hold (not what you’d hope to have happen), during which time he started to sweat profusely and freak out over every little grumble in his tummy. He finally talked to a mycologist who explained that if he had muscarine poisoning, he would have known it within half an hour, and somehow he’d dodged the bullet. He promised not to eat any more.

  I was very confident about my ability to identify a morel by the time I signed up for the WAM trip in California. I was less confident about the foray’s housing arrangements. I’d traded numerous e-mails with David expressing my qualms about the whole camping thing, and he told me I could stay at the Ice House, a hillbilly joint 8 miles down a curvy road from the campsite. “But then you’ll miss the campfire cocktail hours,” he said, so I asked him to lend me a tent and hoped for the best.

  I drove from Sacramento to the Crystal Basin, stopping in Pollack Pines, as per my instruction sheet, to “top off” my gas tank. The town seemed carved out of the towering forest and smelled like melted snow. I drove up into the mountains, and as I drove I saw first patches, then banks of snow, and watched the thermometer on my dashboard roll steadily backward: 65, 60, 55, 50, 45 degrees. I passed the Ice House, which had lots of big-wheel vehicles in the lot, as well as a lone police car, its cherry light rotating soundlessly. I was shivering in my travel clothes when I arrived at the campsite: a damp, snowy peninsula jutting into a reservoir, covered with giant pine trees thrusting into the sky like missiles, dwarfing the picnic tables and fire pits beneath them. It was late afternoon, and I was the first customer to arrive. David was there, his van disgorging gear, as was Julie Schreiber, a winemaker who was helping with the foray.

  Julie helped me pitch my borrowed tent and then turned to other duties, pointing out the good news that it was too cold for mosquitoes. I crawled inside my tent and crawled out again and then started looking for morels.

  It’s probably safe to say that for most of the history of drinking wine and eating bread, intimate knowledge of yeasts—the fungi behind fermentation—was anecdotal at best. Mushrooms, on the other hand, are much easier to see and speculation about their biology exists in recorded history as far back as the recipes for their consumption. Mentions of mycophagy (from the Greek, myco = fungus, phagy = eating) in ancient texts are multitudinous—it’s like trying to track references to eating fruit—but it is fair to assume they’ve always been eaten.

  In Western culture, the oldest mushroom recipes (versus cooking methods, such as the parchment-baked truffles eaten by the Egyptians) can be found in The Art of Cooking by a Roman gastronome named Apicius, of which there have been more than one, including Marcus Gavius Apicius (about 80 BC to AD 40).* The Art of Cooking might have originated in a Greek culinary monograph, and recipes have likely been added over the centuries. There are recipes for Truffles or Mushrooms in Coriander Wine Sauce, Truffles or Mushrooms in Savory-Thyme Sauce, Rosemary Mint Sauce for Truffles, and so on.

  The Romans were undoubtedly mushroom lovers. They even used special amber knives and silver bowls called boletaria to cook and serve them. But not all cultures appreciate fungi. The English have traditionally characterized mushrooms as being unhealthy, bad tasting, and spiritually degrading, a phobia that many Americans have inherited: “Fungophobia,” fear of fungi, is how one 19th-century British naturalist described it. Mycophobia is another such term. But some of that is changing now, as more people become culinarily savvy and confident about eating wild-crafted products.

  I found morels coming up through the grainy spring snow, a little melted puddle around them as if they were secreting antifreeze, near the outhouses that were strategically placed every 50 yards or so along the campground road. Throughout the trip I would find morels in the most debased places: next to fire pits and under picnic tables, and though David explained to me that morels like “disturbed earth,” they seemed to me sociable, as if they preferred to be around people.

  I snacked on provisions I had brought for dinner, and that night I lay in my icy tent, falling into periodic chilly unconsciousness, then awakening again to listen to the comings and goings of people as they arrived throughout the evening and gathered by the campfire, but I was too cold to go outside and socialize. By 6:00 a.m., however, the birds were ferocious and I could smell coffee, and so I got up to meet my fellow campers. Unfortunately, during the night my sleeping bag had sprung a leak, and I emerged covered with tiny feathers. Additionally, somehow I’d managed to get my fashionable black camping outfit into a patch of tree sap, and the feathers that adhered to those spots (mainly, to my dismay, on my behind) remained stuck there throughout the trip. I looked like a pigeon chick whose feathers were still growing in. I also found a morel behind my tent.

  Sven Revel of Fairfax, California, was our chef. That morning he whipped up a batch of scrambled eggs with morels that tasted all the better because we were eating outside and the air was chewy with smoke fire and the morels had been picked moments before. There were about 12 of us, people from all walks of life: a sex columnist, a psychiatrist, a wine-maker. Even as we introduced ourselves, everyone kept glancing at the ground, eyes trawling for morels like searchlights. “It’s a disease,” apologized the psychiatrist. David explained where we were going to hunt and how we were going to foray using the buddy system, and then everyone promptly took off on their own.

  Mushroom hunting is a solo sport, made up of people who thrive on the rush of revelation, however modest, and people who like to be alone. They will head deep into the woods, off the trails, under the scrub, looking for virgin territo
ry. And they often get lost. Every fall there are newspaper articles about a mushroom hunter who finally emerges from the woods, exhausted and dehydrated after spending the night lost in the forest.

  They also tend to find bodies. “Mushroom hunter finds head,” is a typical headline. One pair of hunters I heard of found a suicide hanging from a tree but decided to keep hunting for a few more hours before heading out of the woods to call the police. And mushroom hunters dream about mushrooms, too. I have a recurring dream where I ecstatically gather obese, soggy morels in an abandoned formal garden.

  I was looking for morels with all my heart, but I couldn’t help staring at the trees. Many were clearly old growth, with giant girths and trunks that shot up in the air as high as my apartment building, speckled with Day-Glo green lichens. Scientists today recognize that every tree is an ecosystem of animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria. Those glorious giant pines and all the life they supported demanded a kind of veneration, and I was distracted by their presence. So once I had checked all the outhouses, I wasn’t actually finding many mushrooms anymore. David, who I think pitied me because I had come a very long distance to participate (this was becoming my MO), gave me a few pointers: Forget concentrating on specific trees, instead stand still and just look around.

  David commented on what he called the “greed factor” when it came to mushroomers. “The possession overcomes people,” he said. “I like to shake it up by pooling mushrooms.” He must have noticed my panicky look because some people in our group were even less effective than me. “But we won’t,” he continued. “People become attached to a particular mushroom.” And indeed, in looking over my finds at the end of the day, I was amazed that I recognized almost every one. I remembered where I’d picked it and the exhilaration I’d felt when I first saw it.