A Pig in Provence (11 page)

I barely had time to shout my warnings before Oliver called out, “Mommy, look, we’ve found some already. Hurry.” My two children stood pointing excitedly to the clump of
cèpes
at their feet.

After I cut the fungi, I turned them over. “Look at the underneath part. See how it looks like tan foam or sponge rubber? That means these are
cèpes
. If the tops were brown, but the underneath gills rippling, we wouldn’t eat them. Do you understand? Some mushrooms can be very, very dangerous.” I didn’t think they would take a bite of any, but I wanted to be sure.

Within an hour of wandering through the chestnut terraces, poking through the molding leaves, my basket and Mark’s were full of
cèpes
, plus I had a plastic bag of what we determined to be “bad” mushrooms, which we were going to try to identify using Mark’s field guide once we got back to the house. Oliver insisted on carrying the bag, holding it gingerly at arm’s length, stopping every now and then to open it and look. I think he was fascinated by the idea that he had, right there in his hand, potentially poisonous, even fatal mushrooms, many of which he had found himself.

That evening, before dinner, we sat around the long walnut table Mark had made and, by the light of a kerosene lamp, sorted through Oliver’s bag. None of the mushrooms we had found were deadly, but all of them would have made us very, very sick if we had eaten them, which delighted Oliver, who shivered at his brush with poisonous mushrooms. After washing our hands, we cleaned and sliced a couple handfuls of
cèpes
, and Nina added them to the stew of wild boar simmering on the back of the wood-burning stove. As darkness closed in around us, we ate a plate of ham that Mark had salt-cured, with bread that Nina had made in the stone oven built into a covered portico outside the house, and we drank a bottle of red wine, watching the moon rise through the small paned window, casting the slopes below us in a purplish haze. The only sounds were our voices and the gentle bubble from the back of the stove. Soon the small kitchen–living
room was filled with the aroma of meat and mushrooms, and Nina brought the stew to the table, ladling it into bowls.

“Our neighbor on the next mountain shot it and gave us this chunk a few days ago. We have to eat it because there is no way to store it,” Mark told us as we dipped our bread into the thick sauce. This was my first experience with wild boar, and I was a little apprehensive about eating it, fearing it would be too strong, but it wasn’t. It was rich and tender, and the fat slices of
cèpes
, with their earthy perfume, straight from the forest, gathered with our own hands, made a perfect companion for the meat.

After the children had gone to bed, Donald, Mark, and I helped Nina sort, clean, and pack into baskets the
cèpes
she had picked in the forest that day. The next morning we helped her carry them down the mountain, then gave her a ride to Annot to meet the broker.

Of the more than seventy mushroom varieties found in and around Provence, the one that is said to cause 95 percent of the several hundred mushroom-related deaths that occur each year during
la cueillette
is the commonly found
Amanita phalloides.
It is part of a family that includes several deadly mushrooms; others that, while not fatal, are poisonous; and, paradoxically, a variety that is ranked as one of the most exquisite tasting of all wild mushrooms, the
Amanita caesarea.

The amanitas all share certain characteristics: They have a universal veil, a cottonlike membrane that covers the young mushroom completely, causing it to look like an egg as it emerges from the earth. As the mushroom grows, the veil breaks, leaving behind a soft skin resembling an egg shell at the base of the
stalk, called a volva. Sometimes the amanitas have a partial veil as well, which looks like a collar around the upper stalk. Unlike the boletus family, with its spongy undercaps, the amanitas have gills. Their cap colors range from white to tan, yellow, gray, and greenish, with the most spectacular being
Amanita muscaria,
which is brilliant red-orange with white, wartlike specks. Its common name is
tue-mouche,
or fly amanita, so-called because it has long been used to stun flies.

The two most infamous of the family are
Amanita phalloides,
the death cap, which has a brown to greenish cap, and
Amanita
ocreata, the destroying angel, which has a white cap that turns brownish buff or variations thereof as it ages. As their names suggest, they are fatal and their poison has no known antidote. The first symptoms, difficulty breathing, dizziness, and aching, don’t appear for six to twelve hours and by then the deadly toxin has begun to spread throughout the body, causing violent vomiting, diarrhea, and dehydration. By the third day the victim appears to be improving, but since the toxins cannot be eliminated by the liver, unseen damage is spreading throughout the body’s system, and a relapse occurs, with organ breakdown and death by the sixth day. It is a slow, painful death.

Coprinus atramentarius,
inky cap or tippler’s bane, is perfectly edible and reputedly delicious, except in conjunction with alcohol. The combination can result in light-headedness, increased heart rate, nausea, and vomiting. In severe reactions, hospitalization is required, a misfortune that happened to an acquaintance of mine who was careless about his mushrooms and wound up having his stomach pumped in the emergency room of a hospital in Nice after several
pastis
and a fine inky cap
omelette,
accompanied by a half bottle of
château
neuf-du-Pape.

Fear of the fatal doesn’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm for gathering wild mushrooms. It is a mainstream activity, and the season is eagerly anticipated by everyone. Fall issues of French food and cooking magazines feature mushrooms
à la cueillette
on their covers, and the insides are packed with recipes for cooking the fungi in conjunction with other autumnal foods, such as quince, pears, hard squash, walnuts, and persimmons.

Pharmacies take down summer’s posters of bronzed beauties touting tanning creams and replace them with botanically accurate renditions of fungi. Often, plaster models of mushrooms are the featured window display. This is both a service and an advertisement of sorts. Pharmacists in France are trained in mycology and as a public service offer free identification of wild mushrooms that are brought to them in a national attempt to educate mushroom enthusiasts and to reduce the number of mishaps that occur from eating toxic mushrooms.

I’ve never taken mushrooms to a pharmacist myself, but have watched others do so. Once, a youngish man, dressed in an open-necked white shirt, pressed brown pants, and sturdy leather shoes with heavy rubber soles, came into the pharmacy in Barjols where I was waiting for a prescription to be filled and placed a basket of mushrooms on the counter. It’s a small pharmacy in a village of fewer than two thousand people, but it’s quite modern, with gleaming white walls, bright lighting, and a good stock of medicines and beauty products displayed on sparkling glass shelves and counters. The assistants and the cashier wore crisp white jackets, like the pharmacist.

The damp, primeval smell of mushroom and forest emitted strongly from the basket, the antithesis of the hygienic atmosphere. “There’s someone here with mushrooms,” called out one
of the women in white to the pharmacist working in back. He quickly emerged, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.

“Ah, what have we here?” He reached into the basket and pulled out what I knew was an overripe
pisacane,
the local nickname for a member of the boletus family that is edible, though not very good, and is thought to cause excessive urination and constipation. It is readily identifiable by the darkish yellow sponge or pores on its underside. As it ages, the pores brown, the tops slime, and the stem and body quickly become home to thickets of maggots.
“Pas bon,”
the pharmacist declared, wrinkling his nose and tossing it aside, along with several others of the same type, all in poor condition.

I watched as the pharmacist continued to sort through the basket, tossing aside the
pas bon
and the
trés mauvais
mushrooms, and stacking the ones he declared
bon
and
trés
bon in a neat pile.

“Mmm. Nice.” He held up a large, perfectly shaped
Boletus edulis.
“
cèpes
are delicious. Among the very best. Where did you find this one?”

“Ah, non, Monsieur.
I cannot tell you where. My grandmother always told me to keep her mushroom places secret. I have tried hard to remember them. It was a long time ago she took me to the forests with her and showed me where to look.”

“Ah, well,” laughed the pharmacist, “it never hurts to ask.”

I always know mushroom season is beginning when local newspapers such as the
Var-Matin
and
Le Provençal
feature photographs of huge, recently found
cèpes
on their front pages. By the next day, cars are parked in profusion along the roadsides and fill the edges of forest clearings while their occupants forage. The hunt is on. In the open markets and
cèpes
, the crossroads of
information, everyone is talking about what they have found and when—but never where—they are going hunting, and predicting the length and quality of the season, and local vendors begin displaying their fresh finds.

Whenever I am in Provence in the fall, I join in, hunting almost daily, accepting any invitation to go mushroom hunting, even taking my culinary program students out into the forests.

I have limited my personal mushroom gathering to the types that have such a distinct appearance they can’t be confused with any other mushroom. I gather only
cèpes, chanterelles, sanguins,
and
pieds-de-mouton,
hedgehog mushrooms, whose spores hang beneath the rough, irregularly shaped white cap like little stalactites.

I am so confident of my mushroom-hunting skills that I initiate my culinary students into the secrets of
la cueillette
whenever nature permits. I remember one initiate in particular. He was fascinated, he said, by the stories his grandmother had told him of her childhood in Russia when she would go into the forests near her village and gather mushrooms to bring home to her mother to cook. Even though he traveled frequently to Russia, he had never been mushroom hunting and had selected my program specifically for the foraging component. He could hardly wait.

I took him and the other five in the group into the forest between Aups and Salernes late one afternoon the day they arrived. We had been visiting a winery and the forest was on the way home. It was a reasonably good mushroom season that year, but not great, and in the coming twilight he filled his basket with everything he could find, from rotting
pisacanes
to several very respectable sanguins, calling out with excitement over every find.

The next morning he got up early, skipped breakfast, and went directly to the forest on his own, returning with another basket of mushrooms for me to peruse. I covered the kitchen table with newspapers and we took out his finds, one by one, laying them on the paper. Again he had a big selection of
pisacanes
in poor condition and several decent
sanguins,
plus a pockmarked Boletus satanas, and a dozen or more other mushrooms, all
pas bon
to one degree or another.

“And what about this one?” he’d say, holding up an elegant lavender-gray specimen, or a meaty-looking, brownish red one.
“Pas bon,”
I’d have to say, and then watch his face fall as I pointed to the icon representing an empty plate in my mushroom guide, meaning that it wasn’t poisonous, just not good to eat.

“But it looks good,” he’d say.

“I know, some of them are so pretty and smell so good, it’s hard to believe they aren’t good to eat.”

After taking photographs, he reluctantly let me discard all the
pas bons,
and then I taught him and the others how to clean the good ones, how to look for worms, and finally how to cook them. He had found, in his two sorties, about twelve edible mushrooms. We chopped them, then sautéed them with olive oil, garlic, salt, and pepper and put them on toasts to have with our
apéritif
at lunch that day, where he took more photographs of us all eating his wild mushrooms. The rest of the week, whenever he had a chance, he’d wander off into the forest, looking for mushrooms. He also bought as many different ones as he could find in the open markets.

People who come to my culinary program always ask me about truffles in the same breath they ask about mushrooms, which is understandable since they are all fungi, but there are
meaningful differences between the two. First is the season. The frosts that kill the mushrooms are needed to ripen the famous black truffles, so the truffle season is in winter, not fall, and usually lasts until mid- to late February.

The most important difference is habitat. Truffles, which are tubers, grow underground in association with a host tree—oak, hazelnut, pine, or linden—and the spores of the tuber produce filaments that elongate and attach to the roots of the host tree. From this union, mycorrhizae are formed, and eventually the tree’s root system is invaded. Only a trained dog or pig can sniff out truffles, or a very practiced eye might be able to see the tiny flies that lay their eggs in the ground above a truffle.