Down the hill from our garden is a mist. You can see that it’s starting to be autumn:
Look what my wife found:
She saw them on the way home, after collecting the goats from the reservoir, and put them in her pocket. In the autumn our hillside is like an anthill; hundreds of people come up here carrying small baskets, combing the woods for fungi. Some have their own secret place to look. We have a couple of spots we like to think of as our own, though often someone else gets there first. Then we continue on hopefully, and we aren’t usually entirely disappointed. My wife’s trick was to venture on to private property, to boldly go where no myco-gastronomist had gone before. She found them nestled beside the gateway to our neighbour’s farm. We had them fried in butter, with steak.
Earlier in the week we went mushroom hunting with some expert friends and found lots of these:
They seem insignificant. They are trakt (i.e. funnel) kantereller, a small but very strongly-flavoured chanterelle that is known in English as Yellow Foot, or Yellow Stem, in German as Trompetenpfifferling, in French as Chanterelle en tube and in Russian as лисичка желтеющая. If read knows the Mongolian name or anyone the Spanish or Italian, I will put those (and any others, of course. Be the first on your block to know the Wolof word for лисичка желтеющая, Trompetenpfifferling in Twi). The funnel goes down through the stem, ‘trumpet’ is a good description. I’m sorry the picture’s a bit fuzzy.
What I’m hoping to find, and I know they are here somewhere, is steinsopp, or porcini. According to Wikipedia, they have ‘a symbiotic relation with conifers’, so they ought to be around. I’m not a very good mushroom spotter, though. My friend Jon-Petter, the expert, wears his reading glasses to search.
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A Bad Guide 
Chanterelles, how lucky!
When I lived in Northern British Columbia (Canada), surrounded by woods, I had found a great place for chanterelles, which of course I did not reveal to the few other mushroom lovers in the area. But one year I came back from summer vacation to find that the very territory where they grew had been levelled in order to build a compound (offices and houses) for the police and the fisheries department. I never found chanterelles elsewhere in the area.
Chanterelles are great mushrooms to find: they are robust, do not attract worms, keep well in the refrigerator , and freeze wonderfully too. Plus, they are delicious.
Plus, for the novice collector they are unlikely to be confused with any poisonous species.
What a very sad story, m-l.
In Russian the name is similar — лисичка желтеющая (yellowed chanterelles). My landlords and grandchildren walk the yard every morning to pick mushrooms for breakfast. I can spot them, cook them in a variety of ways, and eat them til I pop, but other than chanterelles and whites, I can’t tell the good ones from the bad ones. And even those I wouldn’t pick without confirmation.
Yum.
There are sad stories in France every year about whole families poisoned by picking the wrong kind of wild mushroom. The advice is to take any you find to the local pharmacist, who is (supposed to be) an expert on identifying them.
We get a few in the garden, but not enough to be bothered to take them for identification, so we contibute to supermarket profits.
Lovely pictures, and I envy you your finds.
My friends wot lived in Basle claimed that they took their freshly picked mushrooms to the Municipal Mushroom Inspector, who would discriminate between the deadly and delicious for them. Then again, they claimed to have so much income left over at the end of every month that they would routinely jump into their Porsche and rush down to Milan for the opera.
I have six books on mushrooms, especially on those growing in Canada. If you are serious about mushroom-picking you need to have more than one mushroom book, because species often vary in appearance, and each book emphasizes some details more than others.
One of the most useful books for the Northwest Coast is one from Seattle (Washington State) about hallucinogenic and poisonous mushrooms of the area: the authors are mycologists who are often called in to identify mushroom remains in cases of poisoning (not an easy or pleasant task if those remains have already been in a stomach), so they wanted to forestall the problems. This book is very useful: if you find a mushroom you don’t know or are not sure of, you first look in the book to see whether your mushroom fits into that category. If it definitely doesn’t, at least you know it won’t make you ill or even threaten your life.
I had field mushrooms from the garden for breakfast today, yummy.
The French pharmacists are good with identifying mushrooms, most of the time. I took a basketful of red russulas (and a few cepes) to a local pharmacy. The woman there strongly advised against red russulas, which I used to pick and eat a lot back in Russia. At home I opened my mushroom book, British, and this is what it said about red russulas: poisonous, but widely consumed in Eastern and Northern Europe.
It seems we have quite a lot of mutual interests, Sashura. I haven’t done any running for years, but running with the dogs — I saw that on your blog — sounds like fun. I’m also quite interested in getting a wind turbine, although I’m not yet sure whether it will pay off.
Wikipedia calls the red russula inedible but does not quite call it poisonous. I suppose a mushroom could also be poisonous without being inedible. I mean, tastes good but might make you sick if you eat a large serving.
I’ll consult the Norwegian mushroom book, if I can remember where I’ve put it.
Have a look at what we have here http://normandy-photo.blogspot.com/2009/10/norman-ceps.html
Running and dogs – yes, I get twitching if I don’t run – and they do too.
Always enjoy your quips on languagehat’s posts – good job livening it up.
S.
There are several reasons why some mushrooms which are actually edible are listed as “poisonous” so people won’t try to eat them and regret it for various reasons. For example, some mushrooms may need special preparation to remove toxins; some may cause allergies in many people, some are harmless when cooked but not raw, etc., and some are too easily confused with poisonous species. Others, like the “fly agaric” (Amanita muscaria, the red one with white dots) are usually listed as poisonous because they are hallucinogenic, even though they are not actually harmful to health (but the usual hospital treatment aggravates the symptoms!). There is also the fact that some mushrooms of the same species vary in appearance according to the regions where they grow, so a person familiar with the ones in one area might be confused by similar but not quite the same mushroom in a different area. And some of them look quite different at different stages of their growth. So persons giving advice on mushrooms tend to err on the side of safety.
Some years ago I bought the very interesting book: Soma, divine mushroom of immortality which is about the religious use of Amanita muscaria in Asia (including in Siberia and in the Sanskrit scriptures, where the magic drink “soma” might be the juice of this mushroom)(the book has been criticized, but I find a lot of it very convincing). The author, an American man married to a Russian woman, comments on the anti-wild-mushroom Anglo-Saxon attitude with which he was raised and the musroom-loving attitude of his wife. The cultural contrast started him on a lifelong interest in mushrooms.
Wow, that’s all very interesting, m-l.
I’d always thought the red-and-white gnomes’ houses were deadly poison.
Soma – is it the same soma which Aldous Huxley feeds his proles in The Brave New World? I didn’t realize there was a mushroom connection. Thanks, Marie-Lucie
AJP, even though it is not a deadly poison, I would not advise anyone to try it just offhand, as it will cause symptoms both physical and mental that are not to be trifled with. The Soma book is quite illuminating in this regard, and also in is presentation of the numerous attempts to identify the mysterious soma drunk by the Hindu priests in ancient times. Huxley did not know what it was either.
iirc, the potion drunk by the Hindu sadhu would be not be completely metabolized, and a poverty stricken devotee in search of a numinous experience could drink the urine to recycle the hallucinogen.
This is a cue for empty and one of his voiding jokes.
I’ll pass.
Sashura: Have a look at what we have here http://normandy-photo.blogspot.com/2009/10/norman-ceps.html
If you click on that Norman ceps picture it enlarges to be about a foot high — one advantage of the internet over books.
The Soma book is quite illuminating in this regard, and also in is presentation of the numerous attempts to identify the mysterious soma drunk by the Hindu priests in ancient times.
How does it rate the ephedra claim? From the little I’ve seen and read on it, ephedra seems to be a very strong contender.
Stuart: the book claims that ephedra does not correspond to the detailed descriptions of the plant which produces soma, nor to its most characteristic effects on the taker of the drug (both described in the Sanskrit texts). The author thinks that ephedra is but the best known or most widespread of the various substitutes for the mushroom, resorted to in places where the mushroom did not grow but the rites had to be observed. (For instance, ephedra has been found on some of the mummies in the Tarim Basin).
The book is worth reading, at least for interest.
Nicely done, empty. The pun should be worth some extra brownie points.
Yes, I agree, that was brilliant, Ø. You win a week at the vacation spot of my choice, which today is Coney Island.
Does your choice change daily? Does that mean I get to go to 7 different places?
That’s right. Tomorrow it’s Brighton Beach, Thursday’s Far Rockaway and the weekend starts at the chainlink fence around JFK. The seventh day ends at Babylon*.
*According to Wiki, the nickname of the town of Babylon is … Babylon.
First prize, a week in Springfield, Illinois. Second prize, two weeks in Springfield, Illinois.
If you go to the link for the village of Babylon within the town of Babylon, you learn more about the history of the name, and also that the young Walt Whitman taught school there for a year.
Can I cash this in later? If I make another good joke some day, might I be able to combine the two for some even more appealing prize? Like maybe just a couple of days at the vacation spot of your choice?
Ah, yes, my last bit of humor was consciously a reworking of the same old line that Nijma is also recycling. (I’ve heard it with Philadelphia, too.) I’m not looking for any credit for this one.