Stalking The Wild Mushroom

New York Times

Stalking The Wild Mushroom

By KATHERINE ZOEPF

Published: July 27, 2003

Correction Appended

PICKING and eating wild mushrooms can be a risky business, but, reassuringly, the members of the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association don't look like reckless types.

Gathering for one of their regular mushroom walks on a recent Saturday morning, they spent a full 20 minutes readying themselves for the hazards of the trail: checklists, knives and guidebooks were put at the ready, sun block and mosquito repellent were applied, and trouser legs were tucked into socks. Thus prepared, the band of mushroom hunters swung yellow, Goldilocks-style straw baskets over their arms, and filed into the woods.

Steve Rock, a tall man wearing dark glasses and a safari vest covered with brightly colored mushroom appliqués, said that collecting wild mushrooms was a tradition in his family. ''My father's father emigrated from Poland, where mushroom hunting is taken pretty seriously,'' he said. ''My father learned how to pick mushrooms from his father. But I tend to see it more as an esoteric interest that's fun to share with other people. That's how I came to join the mushroom club.''

The mushroom club -- the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association -- was founded in 1975, and has a steady membership of about 100. Members call themselves amateur mycologists -- those who study mushrooms and other fungi.

It's a quirky culture: mushroom jokes include the name of the association's newsletter, ''Spores Illustrated,'' which includes a regular column by the president of the club called ''Notes From Underground,'' and the way members refer to the group, by the unfortunate shorthand COMA. ''Some people think it's a little snide, but it always gets laughs,'' one member noted.

The club's activities include half-day mushroom walks as well as weekend-long mushroom forays, mushroom identification workshops, mushroom lectures, mushroom photography and mushroom-based meals that some members call ''mycophagy sessions'' (from the Latin words myco, meaning fungus, and phagia, meaning eating).

But while most members do enjoy eating the wild mushrooms they find, they say that science, not gastronomy, is the focus of the club's activities.

''We consider ourselves serious amateur mycologists,'' said the association's president, David Rose. ''Like all scientists, we use the Latin names for the sake of accuracy. An interest in eating mushrooms may be a major point of entry into mycology, but certainly most people who eat mushrooms are not mycologists, and not all mycologists are mycophagists. I have met highly advanced mycologists who don't eat mushrooms. They just don't like the taste.''

Wending their way along the trails at Clarence Fahnestock Memorial State Park, the mushroom hunters exclaimed frequently about the beauty or rarity of a particular find, but the question of edibility hardly came up.

Don Shernoff, who tracks the names and locations of the various fungi found by COMA members over the years, made notations on one of the extensive species checklists that he carries with him on all mushroom walks.

Beverly Leffers used a knife to cut a large unidentified mushroom from the ground, releasing a sharp cucumbery smell into the air.

Dianna Smith knelt in the dirt to photograph a mushroom that, on account of its intoxicating effects, is popularly known as Big Laughing Gym. Steve Rock helped a newcomer use a hand lens to examine the spongy pores on the cap of a small brown bolete.

They all agreed that several weeks of heavy rain had made for some excellent mushroom hunting.

To spend much time with a group of dedicated mushroom hunters is to become quickly seduced by the taxonomy of mushrooms.

The long Latin names roll easily off the COMA members' tongues as they debate the identity of a particularly puzzling mushroom, and the mushrooms' common names seem alternately fanciful (Fairy Ring Mushroom, Fuzzy Foot, Tumbling Puffball), whimsical (Brown Dunce Cap, Shaggy Parasol, Witch's Hat), or even frightening (Destroying Angel, Corpse Finder, Poison Pie).

The mushroom walk was followed by lunch and a mushroom identification session. A mushroom can be identified by such factors as the color, the shape of the cap, the way the cap feels to the touch (damp, dry, sticky, or slimy), and the presence on the cap of hairs or scales or radial lines. The mushroom hunters trade questions. Does the underside of the cap have gills or pores, and how big are they? What do the stalk and the root look like? Is there a veil or a membrane?

There is much to confound the beginner. Mushrooms can look very different at the various stages of their life cycle, and often the only conclusive way to identify a mushroom is to take it home and perform a spore print (a process that usually involves leaving a mushroom cap, detached from its stem, face down on a piece of white paper for several hours).

Mushroom hunters have a reputation for being ruthlessly secretive, territorial types, dedicated to solitary foraging, and willing, if necessary, to carry the knowledge of a dependable morel or porcini spot to the grave. (Some have also spoken from beyond the grave: directions to a treasured spot, it is said, may be left in a will for future generations.)

YET the mood among the dozen or so group members on the walk was chatty and cheerful, and interesting finds were shared among the group. This sociability, group members say, is part of what distinguishes them as amateur mycologists, those who are interested in the whole breadth and scope of the fungal world, as opposed to mere mycophagists, the traditional mushroom hunters who forage for the table and tend to focus on only a handful of tasty species.

Mr. Rock drew a contrast between his father's hunt for edible mushrooms and his own interest in mycology, which encompasses mushroom photography, mushroom identification, and the study of mycorrhizae, fungi that have a symbiotic relationship with certain plant root systems.

''My father's only going to pick the species that he knows,'' Mr. Rock said. ''That's pretty typical. When you're looking for mushrooms to eat them, you're just looking for something that's delicious. My father only looks for three or four different edible species of bolete.''

Leon Shernoff, the editor of the national quarterly magazine, ''Mushroom: The Journal of Wild Mushrooming'' said that most mushroom hunters in the United States in fact, often hunt only a single species. Mr. Shernoff, a graduate student in musical composition at the University of Chicago and a member of the Illinois Mycological Association, also happens to be the son of Don Shernoff, a member of the Connecticut-Westchester group.

''In the Midwest, you have thousands of people who go out for morels in the spring, and who look for nothing but morels,'' Mr. Shernoff said. ''And you have other people who only look for hen-of-the-woods. The hen-of-the-woods mushrooms are particularly popular with Polish and Italian people.''

Mr. Shernoff said that hobbyist mycologists often resent the foragers, who flood into the woods for a short period of the spring or the fall, trampling other flora and fungi in their haste to find the most prized mushrooms.

''There's some jealousy, too, because usually these people are better at finding the edibles than we are,'' Mr. Shernoff said. ''I remember one mushroom hunt we did here with the Illinois Mycological Association. We had just got to the woods, and there was a man coming out with these two, huge 10-gallon plastic pails, both full of hen-of-the-woods. He could tell that we were out looking for mushrooms too, and he just gave us the smuggest look, because he'd got there first.''

Mr. Shernoff, said he belonged to the Connecticut-Westchester group as a recent college graduate living at home in Westchester. Its character may be very different from the character of other such clubs, he said. COMA no longer does joint walks with the Manhattan-based New York Mycological Society for this reason, he added.

''They were very competitive,'' Mr. Shernoff said of the New York City mushroom hunters. ''When COMA got to the woods with them, they'd scatter and go in all directions, to try to find all the mushrooms before anyone else did.''

Judy Roger, a spokeswoman for the North American Mycological Association, estimated that, at present, there are as many as 6,500 active amateur mycologists in the United States.

Wild mushroom hunting is not nearly as widespread in the United States as it is in many other countries. Strong folk traditions of searching for wild mushrooms are common in places as varied as Russia, Italy, China, Japan and the Koreas, all places where the search ends in the frying pan and not under the microscope.

''Robert Gordon Wasson first posited the dichotomy between the mycophilic and mycophobic cultures,'' said Mr. Rose, referring to a well-known mid-20th-century amateur mycologist and historian. ''For example, Eastern European and some Asian cultures tend to be very mycophilic. They love mushrooms, and they eat them regularly.''

Russia is ''the classic mycophilic culture,'' he said, as mushrooms regularly appear in literature and art.

''There's a classic scene in 'Anna Karenina' where one of the characters is on a mushroom hunt with his beloved, and hoping to broach the topic of marriage,'' Mr. Rose said. ''And he becomes so engrossed in the mushroom hunt that he forgets to propose. Now that, to me, is a great literary moment! Mushrooms interfere with romance!''

BUT in the United States, Mr. Rose said, when he tells people that he is interested in mushrooms, he is often met by wrinkled noses or nervous laughter.

''I hear two typical reactions,'' Mr. Rose said. ''The first is, 'Oh my God, that's disgusting!' And the second is, 'Oh, I understand, are you interested in hallucinogens?'''

''Generally speaking, British and American cultures are mycophobic,'' Mr. Rose continued. ''Without considering mushrooms' natural beauty, people in mycophobic cultures tend to see mushrooms as toxic or unpleasant. In America, only in the last 20 years or so do you see the loosening of that fear.''

But, as Leon Shernoff pointed out wryly, ''Our fungophobia does keep more of us alive.''

Mr. Shernoff said that, in the European countries with a strong tradition of eating wild mushrooms, there is a much higher incidence of death by mushroom poisoning than in the United States, where such deaths are extremely rare.

In the United States over the last three years, he said, poisonous mushrooms have claimed no human lives -- only canine ones.

A handful of professional chefs are members of COMA, and they suggest that wild mushrooms are becoming a great deal more popular among American restaurant patrons than they were a generation ago.

Rocanne Iarriccio, a chef from Waccabuc who has been a member of COMA for about five years, said that the popularity of wild mushrooms received a major boost from the organic food movement.

''We're seeing a move toward trying to eat more seasonally, and more organically,'' Ms. Iarriccio said. ''And this has led a whole new generation of chefs into the woods. Plus, of course, wild mushrooms are delicious! A wild mushroom has a meatiness to it, a deep, woodsy, earthy flavor. It makes a nice departure from all the chlorophyllic vegetables we usually eat.''

Amy Farges, who runs Marché Aux Delices, a specialty food supply service that delivers fresh, wild mushrooms to restaurants in Manhattan and elsewhere, said that when she and her French-born husband, Thierry, began their business in 1987, she often met top-flight chefs who couldn't tell an oyster mushroom from a portobello.

''Now the only people who even ask for portobellos are from these little one-horse towns in Texas,'' said Ms. Farges, who is an amateur mushroom hunter though not a member of the group. ''The chefs here know what a mousseron is, and they know not to ask for morels out of season. There's a lot more awareness of wild mushrooms now.''

Ms. Iarriccio said that, as a professional chef, she is the classic example of a person drawn to joining a mycological association in the hopes of broadening her knowledge of edible wild mushrooms.

''But since then, I've really learned to appreciate the beauty of mushrooms,'' Ms. Iarriccio said. ''The COMA folks are just amazing. They love to cook with mushrooms, but they also know everything about the life cycle, everything about the ecology of the forest. They really are true mushroom people.''

After Foraging, Get the Frying Pan

MUSHROOM-HUNTER'S SANDWICH

From Leon Shernoff, editor of the national fungus magazine, Mushroom: The Journal of Wild Mushrooming

Wild mushrooms

Butter

Milk

1 cooked potato (if you have a microwave, you can cook it while you're preparing the mushrooms. Otherwise, you'll need to cook it in advance,)

Onions (optional)

Crusty sourdough bread.

1. Chop mushrooms into one-quarter-inch pieces.

2. Sauté the mushrooms and the onions (chopped) in some butter. I use just enough butter to get them started; after a while, they give off juices and cook in their own liquid. Cook them until they are soft.

3. While this is going on, you can cook your potato. If you have enough mushrooms for a large frying pan, use a large potato. If you only have enough for a small frying pan, use a small potato. This is why it's helpful to have a microwave: you never know how many mushrooms you will find. If you don't have a microwave, you have to cook a variety of sizes of potato in advance.

4. When the mushrooms are soft, add about one-quarter of the milk to the frying pan. If you are using portobello mushrooms, as I often do, the milk will turn a hideous gray color from the mushroom spores. Pay this no mind.

5. Reheat until the milk is just starting to simmer, then break open your potato and mash it into the frying pan, mixing well with all the juices. Onions can be added if desired. You should have a thick concoction with chunks of mushroom in it.

6. Bring the pot and the bread to the table, and let people cut themselves slices of bread and spread them with the mushroom mixture. If you really must have an herb garnish on a sandwich like this, bring the fresh herbs to the table also, so that people can apply these at will.

MORELS WITH CALVADOS

From Amy Farges

at Marché aux Delices

1 pound morels (fresh are best, but dried may also be used)

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

Lemon juice to taste

Sea salt

Freshly ground pepper

2 ounces Calvados

1/2 cup heavy cream

1 teaspoon chopped fresh tarragon.

1. Trim and clean morels by wiping off or rinsing the grit out, and slice them lengthwise in half. The dried morels should be soaked per package instructions. Over medium heat, melt butter in a large sauté pan. Cook the morels, stirring, until they give up their liquid, about six minutes. Sprinkle with lemon juice, and salt and pepper to taste.

2. When just a few drops of liquid remain, remove the pan from the fire. Pour in the Calvados, let it bubble until it is mostly evaporated, add the cream and return to the stove. Boil over medium-high heat for two to three minutes, until the sauce is of coating consistency.

3. Stir in the tarragon and spoon onto individual plates garnished with a slice of buttered and toasted French bread. To turn it into a hearty meal, serve as a side dish for chops or a steak, or tumble over fresh fettucine.

Serves six as an appetizer.

Correction: August 3, 2003, Sunday An article last Sunday about mushroom hunting referred incorrectly to joint walks held by the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association and the New York Mycological Society. The two groups indeed still hold a joint walk each fall, according to David Rose, president of the Connecticut-Westche