Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [41]
Ginseng, another Appalachian botanical curiosity, is hunted and dug up for its roots, which sell for enormous prices to consumers on the other side of the world. “Sang” hunters know where to look, and tend to keep their secrets. So do Molly Mooch hunters, and if you think you’ve never heard of such, you just don’t know the code. A Molly Mooch is a morel.
The mushroom genus Morchella contains some of the most highly prized of all edible wild fungi. Morels fruit in the spring, and just to keep you on your toes regarding the wild mushroom situation, they contain toxic hemolysins that destroy red blood cells—chemicals that are rendered harmless during cooking. (Just don’t eat them raw.) Their close relatives, the Gyromitra, are pure poison, but the edible morels look different enough from anything else that they’re safe to collect, even for novice mushroomers like me. Their distinctive tall caps are cupped and wrinkled in a giraffish pattern unique to their kind. Here in the eastern woodlands we have the black, common, tulip, and white morels, and one unfortunate little cousin called (I am so sorry) the Dog Pecker. All are edible except for the last one. They’re similar enough in ecology and fruiting time that we’ve sometimes gathered many types on the same day, from the same wooded areas. I’ve heard them called Molly Mooch, sponge mushrooms, haystacks, dryland fish, and snakeheads. What everyone agrees on is that they’re delicious.
Wild mushrooms are among the few foods North Americans still eat that must be hunted and gathered. Some fungi are farmed, but exotics like the morel defy all attempts at domestication. Maybe that’s part of what we love about them. “With their woodsy, earthy, complex flavors and aromas, and their rich, primeval colors and forms,” writes Alice Waters, wild mushrooms bring to our kitchens “a reminder that all the places we inhabit were once wildernesses.” They are also incredibly hard to find, very good at looking exactly like a little pile of curled, dead brown leaves on the forest floor. In my early days of Molly Mooching, I could stand with my boots touching one without spotting it until it was pointed out to me. They’re both particular and mysterious about where they grow: in old apple orchards, some people vow, while others insist it’s only around the roots of tulip poplars or dying elms. Whatever the secret, the Molly Mooches do know it, because they tend to show up in the same spot year after year.
On our farm we could have walked the woods for the rest of our lives without finding one, because they don’t grow near our roads or trails, they’ve never shown up in our old apple orchard, and they’re shy of all other places we normally frequent. Where they do grow is in Old Charley’s Lot. We know that only because our friends who grew up on this farm showed us where to look. This is the kind of knowledge that gets lost if people have to leave their land. Farmers aren’t just picturesque technicians. They are memory banks, human symbionts with their ground.
My family is now charged with keeping the secret history of a goat, a place, and a mushroom. Just as our local-food pledge had pushed us toward the farmers’ market on the previous Saturday, it pushed us out the back door on the following cold, rainy Monday. Morels emerge here on the first warm day after a good, soaking mid-April rain. It’s easy to get preoccupied with life and miss that window, or to coast past it on the lazy comfort of a full larder. This April our larder was notably empty, partly I suppose for just this reason—to force us to pay attention to things like the morels. Steven came home from his teaching duties, donned jeans and boots, and headed up toward Old Charley’s Lot with a mesh bag in hand. Mushroom ethics mandate the mesh collecting bag, so the spores can scatter as you carry home your loot.
No loot was carried