TROUBLE WITH THE FOOD GODS

 Following up from the previous post, I’ve been thinking about mushrooms.  

I actually think about mushrooms pretty regularly.  Mushrooms are (very 

often) on the ground to begin with, so the five second rule obviously 

doesn’t apply there.  On the other hand, not all mushrooms are to be 

snatched up and eaten.

My friend Nick who used to be a hospital administrator, tells the story of a family – mother, father, two children - who came to the hospital complaining of stomach pains.  They’d been out foraging and had eaten some dodgy mushrooms. They were admitted to hospital – AND ALL FOUR OF THEM NEEDED LIVER TRANSPLANTS!!

 

This has made Nick, and me too, very wary about eating mushrooms in the wild.  I have a couple of books that supposedly help you identify them, and I’ve even played around with an app, but I remain unconfident about my identification abilities.  This, of course, has nothing to do with them being on the ground.

 

Above is one of the more melancholy photographs I’ve ever taken – at the seaside in Walton on the Naze.  This sad ice cream was just lying there on the stepped parapet at the seafront.  You know there must be a backstory, very possibly one involving some unhappy and disappointed child who dropped it.  Unless maybe the child was peevish and discarded the ice cream while having a tantrum. Also, I admit, the ice cream isn’t quite on the ground, but it’s definitely heading that way.

 

And just so you know that the food gods are there to punish you if you start feeling the slightest confident, yesterday afternoon, I knocked a tub of cream out of the fridge and onto the floor.

 

I know there’s no use crying over split milk, but couldn’t an exception possibly be made for split cream?

FORAGED FROM THE HEADLINES

Maybe you saw some headlines, such as the one in the Evening Standard:

 

And below it a story about mushroom foragers who’d been collecting fungi in large  quantities from Epping Forest, then selling them to fancy London restaurants and markets.

The legality, or otherwise, of this was pretty straightforward.  Foraging is generally legal on public land in the UK, but only if it’s for personal consumption and if you don’t collect more than 1.7kg. 

 

But the professional foragers of Epping Forest were taking much more than that, and they’ve now been stopped.  Some of them have been given fines, and foraging has been completely banned in the forest.  There are wardens to enforce it apparently.

 

Of course John Cage made a significant income from selling foraged mushrooms to fancy New York restaurants, but there was only one of him.

As for that headline, you could argue about whether mushrooms have anything to do with the ‘green lungs’ of London or anywhere else.  Obviously mushrooms are not green because they don’t contain chlorophyll and in most circumstances they ‘breathe’ much the way that  animals and humans do - oxygen in and carbon dioxide out.  You might also note that significant amounts of Epping Forest are not in London.

 

         When I’m out walking I’m always fascinated by mushrooms growing wild and often I take a picture or two and when I get home I try to identify the specimen. I find this incredibly difficult, and I would never dream of eating something I’d foraged.  There’s a reason for this.

 

I used to share a flat with a man who was a hospital administrator in London.  One day, he told me, a family of four pitched up in A & E at the hospital complaining of stomach pains.  They’d been out foraging wild mushrooms, eaten them, and then come down with terrible stomach pains.  The hospital was eventually able to sort them out – a process that involved giving all four of them liver transplants.  A cautionary tale.  

 

According to that Evening Standard article there are over 1,500 varieties of mushroom in Epping Forest. I hope those foraging lads knew what they’re doing.

 

THE SHROOM AND I

I went to the exhibition at Somerset House titled: Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi curated by Francesca Gavin, which according to the publicity is celebrating ‘the remarkable mushroom, and all the progressive, poetic and psychedelic wonder it evokes’ – i.e. it seemed to be heavily directed towards fans of ‘shrooming, though in fact when I went there quite a few mothers and children, ‘Oh yes, little Fiona just loves psilocybin.’  For obvious reasons I didn't photograph the children.

         The exhibition also, and I’m quoting here, shows ‘ground-breaking experiments in design, textiles and architecture that utilise mushrooms in exciting new ways – from upcycled agro-waste to sustainable shoes made with mycelium.’ I’m no fashion maven but if the shoes in the exhibition are anything to go by, it may take a while before they catch on.

         Fortunately there was art too, lots of ‘emerging artists’ I’d never heard of but also work Cy Twombly, Beatrix Potter, Carsten Höller (who made the mushroom suitcase above), and quite a few others including Takashi Murakami.  



Want to see a picture of me standing next to Takashi Murakami?  Of course you do.  I'm the one on the left.

There were also books in display cases which I always like, 

and this included a copy (actually an artist’s proof) of Mushroom Book, actually more or a folio, by John Cage, Alexander H. Smith, and Lois Long.  Since it was only an edition of 75 this is, as they say, ‘a rare chance to see.’

And frankly I was glad for the presence of Mr. Cage, (I pretty much always am) because given the rest of the exhibition you might never have known that mushrooms were things that people actually eat for food.  Cage used to forage for mushrooms and sell them to fancy New York restaurants.  He even appeared in Vogue with his recipe for ‘dogsup’ – a version of ketchup with mushrooms (type unspecified) brandy, mace, cayenne, allspice and other good things.

I came out of the exhibition wanting to have my consciousness expanded but more urgently with the urge to buy and cook some mushrooms; which I did.

Now mushrooms, as you probably know, are low in calories and fat, and cholesterol-free, they’re rich in copper, potassium, magnesium, zinc and some B vitamins, and antioxidants such as selenium and glutathione. Now I’ve never met anyboy who said, ‘Mmm I’ve really got a hankering for selenium and glutathione,’ but possibly such people exist.

I bought some brown and white shimeji, they were from China, and enoki, they were labeled ‘product of Korea’ - south, I’m assuming.  Did I feel guilty about their lack of localness, well of course I did.

I fried ‘em up with garlic and rocket, and stirred in some cooked gnocchi and a bit of grated cheese – and they weren’t bad at all, though when I do it again there’ll be a LOT more garlic, and perhaps a splash of psilocybin

THE SILENCE OF THE MUSHROOMS

If you do an image search for ‘world’s biggest mushroom’ you come up with a lot of pictures that look like fakes, though obviously not all.

This one seems real enough and the feet belong to Gina Gershon – helluva gal! 

Mushrooms have been on my mind since I bought this substantial, though hardly record-breaking, mushroom in the Co-op in Manningtree. It’s a locally grown Portobello mushroom from Suffolk, and record-breaking or not I do believe it’s the biggest mushroom I’ve ever used in cooking.

But we need to go back before this, when I saw and bought this packet of mushroom sauce mix in the Co-op:

It’s Polish-ish (in fact made by Nestle) and contains, in powered form, four kinds of mushroom: boletus, champignon (which, essentially monoglot as I am) I thought was just the French word for all mushrooms but maybe not), suillus, and xerocomus.  Xerocomus looks like this (not the world's biggest):

I did wonder whether adding mushrooms to a mushroom sauce was a mistake – and on balance I think it was. I should have added chestnuts or sprouts or at the very least lemon juice, but we live and learn.

Here’s John Cage doing stuff with mushrooms (note the lemon):

NOT MUSHROOM INSIDE

I was at a nearby Farmers Market t’other Sunday and there was a stall selling  mushrooms, and they had baskets of mixed mushrooms – and I’m a sucker for good mushrooms and at the other Farmers Market that I sometimes go to there’s a guy who sells the very best wild mushrooms.  Actually now that I think about it I'm not sure whether he just forages for them or whether he grows them himself; if the latter then I suppose they're cultivated  wild mushrooms, which may be a contradiction in terms.  In any case, the ones I was looking at, I was pretty sure, weren’t wild in any sense, but they looked interesting enough and I bought a basketful, which cost 8 dollars.

And I got them home and spread them out on a plate and although they still looked perfectly OK, they seemed a little less exciting than I'd imagined, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that the man running the stall might have just been into the local supermarket, bought a bunch of different kinds of mushroom and then arranged them in baskets so that they look artisanal.  I reckoned I could have done that myself and probably could have brought it in for less than 8 dollars.  On the greater scale of food annoyances this one was exceptionally minor, but still …

Actually the Loved One and I did briefly try to grow wild mushrooms. It involved drilling holes in logs and then filling them with spores.  It wasn’t our greatest success.  And the results certainly didn’t look remotely like this (well the logs did but not the mushrooms):

We concluded that you probably need a good cave before you can grow mushrooms successfully. But take a look at the guy in this ad:

He’s earning big money, there’s no risk to the grower, and it seems perfectly possible, given the bold type, that he may even have an air raid shelter, even if not a cave.  Some guys have all the luck.