JUNE 3, 2007 - Mushrooms in my part of the world are like maple leaves in the hardwood forests of the east: they give colour to the fall. Come September on the wet coast and the leaves just turn brown and fall into rotting, stinking piles.The mushrooms, though, are shimmering jewels in red,green, pink, orange, white, and space-age blue. Mushrooms, to me, are a symbol of autumn and winter.
Except for morels. The honeycombed caps pop up in dusty soil, their flesh more like a rind than the soft, breakaway meat of the rainy-day mushrooms. I especially like the way they famously explode with abundance in burned-over areas, so much so that pickers sometimes label their crops by the names of wildfires: Okanagan Mountain; Strawberry Hill; Chilko Lake. Morels somehow manage to be even more absurd and mysterious than other mushrooms - I've seen them growing out of clumps of sun-baked dirt churned up by bulldozer treads; or straight sideways, ignoring gravity, out of the bases of trees. They also have a flavour unlike any other food that sprouts in spring: deeply earthy, faintly smoky, and so subtle that cooking morels with anything more than garlic, butter, and a pinch of salt risks overwhelming the mushroom. It's a flavour to remind you that even as spring erupts with new life, death, too, continues its cycle.
Mushroom pickers in British Columbia have something of a bad rap. They're not well known for their friendliness - I remember waving to some as I approached them while hiking a rail line through the wilderness; they didn't wave back. I've seen them armed and drunk at 9 a.m., trying to hide the bags of fungi that they've picked. They've been known to put sugar in the gas tanks of their competitors. There's money in wild mushrooms, and no one wants to share their secret patch - even with the people who might happen to own the property. Pickers are modern frontiersmen (and women), and the most committed of them have only a van or a tent to call home.
I bought a few pounds of fresh morels from a wild-foods forager this past weekend. They are always fairly expensive, though with careful use I expect this weekend's box will serve Alisa and me three times for $10. Not bad for a spring treat.
In fact, the price was lower and the mushrooms bigger, better, and more numerous than I've seen in a while. "Is it looking like a pretty good year for morels?" I asked the vendor at the farmers' market, who seemed a pretty friendly guy.
His face clouded with the scowl of someone who has just been asked to reveal trade secrets. "I can't tell yet," he said warily. "It might be, it might not."
I looked meaningfully at all the boxes just bursting with mushrooms, and then looked back at him. A small smile crept across his face, like the kid who ate the slice of his sister's birthday cake and knows he's just been caught.
"Well," he said shyly, "I think it might be pretty good."-JBM
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Except for morels. The honeycombed caps pop up in dusty soil, their flesh more like a rind than the soft, breakaway meat of the rainy-day mushrooms. I especially like the way they famously explode with abundance in burned-over areas, so much so that pickers sometimes label their crops by the names of wildfires: Okanagan Mountain; Strawberry Hill; Chilko Lake. Morels somehow manage to be even more absurd and mysterious than other mushrooms - I've seen them growing out of clumps of sun-baked dirt churned up by bulldozer treads; or straight sideways, ignoring gravity, out of the bases of trees. They also have a flavour unlike any other food that sprouts in spring: deeply earthy, faintly smoky, and so subtle that cooking morels with anything more than garlic, butter, and a pinch of salt risks overwhelming the mushroom. It's a flavour to remind you that even as spring erupts with new life, death, too, continues its cycle.
