Advance of the Fungi

Although there have been regular thunderstorms, it has actually been a dry summer with the water table and pond levels at very low levels. There have been various side effect, good and bad: the natural cycle of things has been early by a week or two, there have been few mosquitos and fewer mushrooms.

The big rain on Saturday changed things a bit. Not only did mosquitos return but so did the mushrooms. I found a variety of species including a beautiful purple bolete (which, alas, turned out to be very bitter), a small, fat, perky bolete that was delicious, a burst of Lactarius volemus and lots of chanterelles.

The Lactarius is a very distinctive orange-brown 'milk mushroom' with white gills which exudes white drops that stain the underside of the mushroom and anything else it comes in touch with (your hands included). It is a crunchy, tasty mushroom, our best edible lactarius.

The chanterelle (Yellow Chanterelle or Golden Chanterelle, Cantharellus cibarius; also known by its French name 'girolle') is our best and most abundant edible mushroom; it's a staple of French cuisine and has recently made an appearance in upscale American markets and restaurants (before that you had to gather you own -- as we still do). There are lots of different ways to prepare this delicacy. My son-in-law (who is French) came up with an original recipe: a kind of risotto made with orzo, a type of pasta that resembles rice and can be made into a non-rice risotto also known as orzotto (it turns out that 'orzo' means barley in Italian and the original orzotto was supposed be made from this; however the pasta sold here as orzo is actually semolina which is the normal pasta grain).

Lots of other mushrooms as well including several kinds of russula and various other boletes (boletes are the mushrooms with the spongy bottoms instead of the knife-like gills). The best way to tell an edible mushroom from a non-edible one (commonly called a toadstool) is to know the mushroom -- literally to ID it accurately. Sometimes easier said than done. To my knowledge, there is no good comprehensive illustrated field guide for mushrooms of the northeast and I depend on a combination of European guides (often detailed and beautifully illustrated by artwork but not always accurate for North America), a California guide that I love ("Mushrooms Demystified" by David Aurora; a very smart, amusing, comprehensive volume but with major emphasis on the West Coast and few illustrations), and the odd picture guide (usually full of photographs but invariably incomplete). There are two ancient volumes focused on the northeast that I sometimes refer to; one is the old NY State Mushroom Handbook by Louis Krieger (from the 1920s) and the other is "1000 American Fungi" by Charles McIlvaine (from the turn of the last century). These last two are hopelessly out-of-date as far as scientific classification is concerned and their illustrations are useless but they cover our region in some detail and have useful descriptions which help a lot (also, both have been reprinted and can still be found). Finally there are several web sites that can be consulted -- but I have yet to get the knack of using them for mushroom ID.

Eric Salzman