I love mushrooms – the edible kind, that is. (Never tried the other kind, sorry.) I’m not sure when I first realized they’re among my favorite foods; I do remember seeing the Good Eats episode “The Fungal Gourmet” and deciding to try the various recipes Alton Brown gave on that show, and discovering I liked them all. It was probably the first time I’d cooked mushrooms, and it inspired me to try a recipe in The Joy of Cooking for a white mushroom pizza with goat cheese, a pizza I still make often and have refined over the last 20 years. That may have been the starting point, but it just scratched the surface of what the kingdom of edible fungi has to offer.
A friend of mine from middle school asked me last month on Facebook if I’d read Langdon Cook’s The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America, a non-fiction narrative work about several people who forage for the wild mushrooms that end up on restaurant plates and occasionally in markets across the country. Not only is the book an extraordinarily interesting study of a gray market industry and two of the eccentrics who live within, but Cook imparts a lot of useful information on various mushroom species – including a few fungi we call mushrooms but that belong to a different phylum, Ascomycota, than true mushrooms – that I’d eaten but never cooked, or seen but never eaten, or just flat-out had never encountered before.
Mushrooms are different from other foods that are foraged in the wild in that their removal does not diminish future supply, and when done responsibly the foraging doesn’t damage the environment. (If the foragers leave trash or are careless with surrounding plants, of course, that’s another story.) Wild mushrooms have extensive root structures below the ground, and humans typically harvest the edible shoots that appear above the surface and allow the mushroom to spread spores. Removing those tips doesn’t kill the mushroom itself, which continues to live in the ground, usually feeding off rotting wood, and will produce new shoots the following year. Different mushrooms live in different climates, with different food sources – sometimes favoring specific species of trees with which they’ve co-evolved over long periods of time – and varying ‘crops’ from year to year. Morels, among the most valuable culinary mushrooms, tend to pop up in abundance after forest fires, although they, like the famous truffles of western Europe and now the Pacific Northwest, are not technically mushrooms but are sac fungi classified in Ascomycota. (They’re also the subject of a great two-player game.)
Cook himself is a character in the book, but the two stars are Doug, an iconoclastic forager with some interesting if not entirely consistent life philosophies; and Jeremy Faber, a mushroom buyer who runs a wholesale service to chefs on the west coast and in New York, and who also forages himself and takes Cook on several of his trips, including the morel hunt in the Yukon that fills the last long chapter in the book. Faber has extensive relationships with chefs in Seattle, including James Beard winner Matt Dillon and Faber’s former business partner Christina Choi, who was a rising star in the Seattle scene before dying far too young during surgery to address a brain aneurysm. Cook follows the mushroom supply chain to the tables of restaurants like those, and to special events like a multi-course dinner at the Oregon Truffle Festival, describing dish after dish with mushrooms used in typical and atypical fashions. If this book doesn’t make you want to cook with mushrooms, you probably just don’t like the things in the first place.
Doug is the perfect eccentric for a book like The Mushroom Hunters, with his mix of humanist views and self-serving wisdom, as well as a rather healthy disregard for property rights and the boundaries of national parks. He and Faber rail against federal and state government regulations that treat mushrooms as finite resources and restrict or simply ban foragers from gathering them, even though such activities might be good for the forest and, if done right, do no harm. Their self-interest is obvious here, and Cook acknowledges that not every forager is as responsible about cleaning up their own mess or respecting the other flora and fauna that grow in these environments. It’s also hard to feel much sympathy for Doug when he describes foraging on privately owned land without permission and finds himself threatened or unable to escape with his haul.
The Mushroom Hunters would be a great read if it offered nothing more than its education on mushrooms themselves – how they grow, where they thrive, how they’re gathered, and how to prepare and cook them – within some broader story, but Cook also wraps up the story of each species in some larger trip or escapade starring one of the two men at the heart of the book. It is a book about the foodstuffs themselves, with appearances from a handful of other wild plants the foragers often target, while also giving a window on to this shadow economy that also includes numerous immigrants from Mexico and southeast Asia, and thus serves as a bit of a microcosm of our society as a whole, with stories of racism, economic inequality, and labor exploitation sprinkled throughout the book. If you enjoy the fungus and want to know your chanterelles from your shiitakes, it’s a wonderful, educational read.
Next up: My friend Joe Posnanski’s upcoming book The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini.