Say what you will about letting nature run its course: gardeners want control. The definition of a garden is a tended space, a swath of nature upon which the human will has been imposed. Generally, this imposition produces thriving and can even improve the lot of the wildlife that inhabits our borders. Still, it also involves removing or trimming much of what would naturally have grown. This is why someone with a green thumb is not exactly the same thing as the outdoorsy type. The crunchy, beanie-sporting REI aficionado is a far cry from the kind of person who obsesses over dahlias. We don’t go into a garden for the same reasons that draw us into the wild. In the woods, we observe. In the garden, we survey. It’s with a sense of wonder and detachment that we enter the wilderness—we are not at home. But it’s with a sense of ownership that we walk into a garden. We are there to work our will. As Mole put it in The Wind in the Willows, gardeners are “creatures of the field and hedgerow,” homebodies who relish the developing complexities of their half-tame microcosm, who prefer the tended and subtle over the wild or sublime.
Nonetheless, the wild has some attractions for us, too, especially if we’re interested in food. This time of year, when the leafy warmth seems endless, I find myself looking for new reasons to get outdoors. The initial thrill of simply being able to sit on the porch with a book has grown a little less piercing, and a generalized sense of restlessness pervades the days. Here and there, the first renegade spurts of red or orange festoon the edges of the maples, reminders that the planet has already pivoted toward the grand transition that, come October, will bring the cleansing frost and the clear, blue-starred nights that signal the end the growing season in the Northern Hemisphere like a falling curtain. As languorous as they might seem, these are days to be marked, seized, and enjoyed.
They are also often days of rain. The huge storms that tear themselves to cloudy shreds along the North Atlantic coast in August and September send waves of wet weather streaming through at regular intervals, saturating the warm earth. Leaf litter breaks down generously in the shady heat, aided by insects in their crawling trillions: the perfect conditions for that most mysterious of foods, mushrooms. My paternal grandmother was a brown-haired, red-faced, doggedly sensible woman whose curly crown never stood above five feet, and the family agrees that she was almost certainly a hobbit. It’s perhaps because of that lineage that I’m an avowed and obsessive mushroom-eater. I have a glowing memory of my dad teaching me to pan-sear shitakes in a bath of butter one late summer day when I was thirteen. One taste and I was hooked, having since expanded my explorations in every possible direction: morels, oysters, puffballs, rishis.
The mushroom varieties you can find at a local grocery or specialty food store are manifold and delicious. Tossed in a soup, they yield a deep-brown umami that makes the broth as complex and covetable as the meat. Seared al dente and spooned over eggs, they are the king of country breakfasts. And they are the only thing in creation that can improve the perfection of a steak au poivre, a crowning glory that deepens the cognac-laced cream without distracting from it, which is quite a trick. Those applications alone are enough to last any cook a lifetime. But mushrooms are also one of those foods that tend to resist cultivation and mass production. Precious few of the best varieties can be farmed. The rest grow wild at our feet, a pleasure we pass by a hundred times a summer, never knowing what we missed. If you get a taste for mushrooms, there can come a point when all that wasted potential becomes untenable. When you unconsciously cross a foraging meridian.
So this August, I set my sights on the king of wild mushrooms: the chanterelle. Taking its name from the Greek word kantharos, meaning "tankard" or "cup," this trumpet-shaped, creamsicle-orange mushroom is abundant in deciduous forests in Eurasia, Africa, and North America. It was apparently the French who first realized the chanterelle’s potential in cuisine, which is only one of many expressions of that great nation’s instinct for unfussy deliciousness. It smells of apricot, stands up to cooking beautifully, and tastes like a marriage of steak, butter, and stone fruit. It cannot be farmed. It only grows wild. And, with a little study and careful observation, its secrets can be learned even by a home-bound hedgerow man like myself.
Of course, the usual cautions and fears came up in conversations with friends. Aren’t a lot of mushrooms poisonous? Yes, they are. Does the chanterelle have toxic look-alikes? It does indeed. Will you eat any if you’re not 100% sure of their identification? No. But our folklore and fears about mushrooms are, to my mind, a little unmerited and extreme. We all know that chicken will poison us if we don’t cook it enough, and the least horticulturally-minded dunce can tell the difference between blackcurrants and deadly nightshade. We all know how to hedge our bets and think through what we consume. Why shouldn’t the same logic apply to this other, stranger food? Strengthened by this logic, I set out on a hot Sunday morning after a thunderstorm, into the woods.
It was the sort of weather that makes your shirt cling to your back from the moment you open the door. Getting out of the car, I was instantly beset by a personalized, spitefully persistent cloud of mosquitos who laughed in chorus at my organic insect repellant. With a small grocery bag, my grandfather’s scrimshaw buck knife, and a beginner’s foraging guide open on my phone, I set out into the humid shade, scanning the trailside, hugging the bogland. Over the next hour, I realized the profound difference between walking through the woods and seeking something there. The former allows you to stay enveloped in distracted thought, but the latter is a kind of rhythmic concentration that can be exhausting if you’re unused to it. Looking for those little flecks of orange in the rolling brown expanse of the forest floor bewildered the eyes: a lifetime has trained us to generalize its million gradients and specificities. Each trail, each acre, each patch of broken shade is its own idiosyncratic biome, spawning and sustaining a specialized troop of fauna and fungi that might starve or desiccate if it were moved only a few feet away. For the better part of forty-five minutes, I ambled and scratched my head like someone trying to solve a math problem. It was a sensory overload of seeing the ground level of the earth anew.
At last, under the green shadow of a line of birches, I literally crushed a chanterelle underfoot, releasing a waft of apricot. Shocked that I hadn’t recognized the very thing I’d been looking for, I picked it up, ticking off the identifiers: white flesh within, false gills, trumpet shape, stone-fruit scent. Then I looked up and around. They say the Wampanoag tribe, when they first saw an English ship coasting under light sail into a Massachusetts harbor, thought it was a cloud. It wasn’t until men began to emerge from belowdecks that they knew it for what it was. The mind, sometimes, can’t make sense of sight without experience. Now I’d seen a chanterelle. And suddenly I could see chanterelles. The path where I’d been walking was lined with hundreds of them, sprawling up through the moss like a ghost-orange army. I bent and began to fill my bag, smiling at this first taste of a new world.
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I can confirm that Granny was indeed a Hobbit. And she loved mushrooms with second breakfast about 10:30 a.m. each morning. Another great article. Love it. Keep 'em coming.
Your writing literally gives me cold chills. I just love it so much - it's like a conversation with you every week. Thanks for writing, bro.