The Omnivore's Dilemma Part 12

Looking for chanterelles at an undisclosed location in Sonoma County, California.

How in the world had he spotted it? The trick, he explained, was to look for signs of something pus.h.i.+ng up the leaves. Then you had to look at the ground sideways to see if you could catch a glimpse of the gold stems of the chanterelle. Yet when Angelo pointed to another spot under the same tree, a spot where he had seen another mushroom, I was still still blind. Not until he had moved the leaves with his stick did the golden nugget of fungus flash at me. I became convinced that Angelo must be smelling the chanterelles before he saw them. blind. Not until he had moved the leaves with his stick did the golden nugget of fungus flash at me. I became convinced that Angelo must be smelling the chanterelles before he saw them.

But that wasn't the case. I just had to learn how to look. The way the mushroom hunters put it is to get your eyes on. get your eyes on. And after following Angelo around for a while, I did begin to get my eyes on, a little. Before the morning was out I'd begun to find a few chanterelles on my own. The mushrooms started to pop out of the landscape, one and then another. And after following Angelo around for a while, I did begin to get my eyes on, a little. Before the morning was out I'd begun to find a few chanterelles on my own. The mushrooms started to pop out of the landscape, one and then another.

FIVE CHANTERELLES.

But after a brief run of luck I promptly went blind again-and failed to find another mushroom all day. I would say there were no more mushrooms left to find, except that Angelo was still finding them in spots I had just visited. I had managed to find just five, though several of them weighed close to a pound each. My five chanterelles were tremendous, beautiful things I couldn't wait to taste.

That night I washed off the dirt, patted them dry, and then sliced the chanterelles into creamy white slabs. They smelled faintly of apricots. I knew at once that this was the same mushroom I had found near my house, the one I had been afraid to taste. The orange color matched, and these had the same shallow ridges running up the stalk. I cooked them as Angelo had recommended, first in a dry frying pan to sweat out their water, and then with b.u.t.ter and shallots. The mushrooms were delicious, with a light flavor-fruity with a hint of pepper-and a firm but silky texture.

And I wasn't the least bit concerned about waking up dead. What had happened to resolve my omnivore's dilemma? Even after reading guidebooks or looking at photographs on my own, I still wasn't sure I'd had a true chanterelle. But when Angelo handed one to me, my doubts vanished. I knew that the next time I found a chanterelle anywhere, I would recognize it and not hesitate to eat it.

I spoke with other mushroom hunters who had the same experience. It seems we need to learn this information in person, from another human being. Maybe that's part of our omnivore's instinct. It's certainly an advantage we have over the omnivore rat, which cannot share its hard-won knowledge of food with other rats.

MUSHROOMS ARE MYSTERIOUS.

Mushrooms each have their seasons. Once the rains stopped in April the chanterelles were done for the year. The next important mushroom hunt would be for the morels, in May. I used the time in between to read about mushrooms and talk to mycolo gists. I had a lot of questions, like: What made mushrooms come up when and where they did? Why do chanterelles live on oaks and morels on pines? Why under some trees and not others?

I learned that there aren't a lot of answers to even the most basic questions. Scientists know very little about the fungi, which are the third kingdom of life on earth. Part of the problem is simply that fungi are very difficult to observe. What we call a mushroom is only a small part of a fungus. Most of it is underground, consisting of a network of microscopic cells called mycelium. mycelium. These thin, threadlike cells form a web buried in the soil. You can't dig up a mushroom to study it because the mycelium is too tiny and delicate. If you try to separate them from the soil they just fall apart. These thin, threadlike cells form a web buried in the soil. You can't dig up a mushroom to study it because the mycelium is too tiny and delicate. If you try to separate them from the soil they just fall apart.

We know the basic parts of a plant-roots, stem, leaves, flowers. But we don't even know for sure if fungi have parts, aside from mushrooms. We don't know exactly why or when the fungus produces a mushroom either. It can go years or even centuries without producing one.

Thanks to chlorophyll, plants are able to transform sunlight, water, and minerals into carbohydrates. Fungi work sort of in reverse. They recycle organic matter with powerful enzymes that can break down organic molecules into simple molecules and minerals.

A mycorrhizal fungus has cells that surround or even go into the roots of a plant. The fungus and the plant have a deal. The fungus gives the plant simple elements and minerals it has taken from the soil. In return, the plant gives the fungus a drop of the simple sugars (carbohydrates) it has made. The fungus cells reach far underground and so act as a second root system for the plant. Trees need these fungal networks to thrive. It is also possible that the fungus gives the tree protection from bacteria or other fungi.

Fungi are an essential part of the life cycle on earth. They are the masters of decay and recycling. Without fungi to break things down, the earth would soon be covered with a blanket of dead plants and animals.

That might be why some people just don't like mushrooms. Even the ones that don't poison us are closely linked to death and decay. Their job is to break the dead down into food for the living. That's much less appetizing than a plant that creates food from sunlight. Cemeteries are usually good places to hunt for mushrooms. (Mexicans call mushrooms carne de los muertos carne de los muertos-"flesh of the dead.")

FANTASTIC FUNGI.

About those poisons. Scientists aren't sure why some mushrooms produce them. The poison might be a defense against being eaten, or it might just be one of the chemicals the fungus needs to do its work that happens to be toxic to humans.

As a food, fungi (or mushrooms, which are the part we eat) don't have much nutritional value. They contain some vitamins, minerals, and some amino acids (the building blocks of protein) but few calories. So mushrooms are not a good source of energy for us. Yet they have enough energy to do some amazing things.

Consider:

MUSHROOMING IS NO PICNIC.

Through Angelo's friend Jean-Pierre I met another mushroom hunter named Anthony Ta.s.sinello. Anthony said he'd be willing to take me morel hunting. He wasn't too worried about keeping the spot secret since we would be hunting "burn morels." These are morels that come up in the spring following a pine forest fire. The fire had been big news and every mushroom hunter in California would be out looking for morels there. Plus, whatever spots we found would only be good for a couple of weeks.

Anthony e-mailed that I should meet him in front of his house Friday morning at six o'clock sharp. He warned me to come prepared for any weather. "We'll go rain, snow, or s.h.i.+ne." He wasn't kidding. The weather up where we were going was extreme. It could snow in May or be very hot or both in the same day.

He also described the ground we would be covering. "It is very steep and rocky with huge, burned fallen trees and ground that is thoroughly soaked. Bring a hat, the sun is stronger at this elevation, plus it keeps cedar needles and spiderwebs out of your face and can double as a mushroom sack when your basket is full." Anthony also advised me to bring sunscreen and bug spray (for mosquitoes), at least a gallon of water, ChapStick, and, if I owned one, a walkie-talkie.

Suddenly, morel hunting didn't sound like much fun. In fact it like survival training than a walk in the woods. I crossed my fingers that Anthony was just trying to scare me, and set my alarm for 4:30 a.m. I wondered why it is all these hunting-gathering expeditions had to begin at such unG.o.dly hours in the morning. I understood why you had to hunt pigs early in the day when they were active. But it's not as though these morels were going to disappear after lunch. Perhaps the idea is to use as much daylight as possible. Or maybe we wanted the early start to beat other mushroomers to the best spots.

WORKING THE BURN.

I pulled up to Anthony's curb a little before six to find two thirtyish-looking men in rain slickers loading an SUV. They were packing enough equipment for an expedition down the Amazon. Anthony was a rail-thin six-footer with a goatee; his friend Ben Baily was a somewhat rounder and softer man with an easy laugh. I learned on the long ride that Anthony and Ben were childhood friends from Piscataway, New Jersey. After college they'd both moved to the Bay Area to become chefs. Anthony told me that we were going to be joined by someone they'd met at the burn the week before, a young guy known to them only by his mushrooming nickname: Paulie Porcini.

Paulie Porcini was part of the subculture of mushroom hunters who travel up and down the West Coast. They follow the mushrooms as they appear: porcinis in the fall, chanterelles in winter, morels in the spring. "These are people living out of vans," Ben explained. They make a living selling their mushrooms to brokers who set up shop in motel rooms near the forests. The brokers put up signs to let the mushroomers know where they are and they pay cash. Then they resell the mushrooms to restaurants and food stores.

We drove for several hours and gradually climbed into the mountains of the Eldorado National Forest. The forest is a twelve-hundred-square-mile swath of pine and cedar stretched between Lake Tahoe and Yosemite. As we rose, the temperature dropped down into the thirties and a frozen rain began to pelt the winds.h.i.+eld. Snow covered the ground. It was early May, but we had driven back into winter.

We were looking for the edge between the snow and bare ground. That's where the morels would be growing. At an elevation of about forty-five hundred feet we found it. We parked the SUV and looked around. Soon after, Paulie Porcini appeared. He was a bearded, quiet fellow in his twenties who carried a walking stick and had a bandanna wrapped around his head. He seemed like someone who was very comfortable in the woods.

The forest was beautiful and it was ghastly. As far as you could see, it was a graveyard of black, soaring trunks. For five days the previous October the "power fire," as it was called, had roared across these mountains, consuming seventeen thousand acres of pine and cedar. The fire had been so fierce in places that it had eaten trees down to the roots. This left blackened holes where the trees had stood. Not much lived in this landscape. We heard owls and saw a few squirrels.

A burned-out pine forest in El Dorado National Forest, south of Lake Tahoe, California.

DOWN IN THE MUD.

That was basically the last time all day I lifted my gaze to take in the view. As soon as Ben announced he'd spotted his first morel, I began looking down. The ground was covered with a thick carpet of pine needles and the charred trunks of pine. A morel resembles a tanned finger wearing a dark and deeply honeycombed dunce cap. They'd be easy to spot if they weren't brown and black. As it was, they seem to disappear against the forest floor.

To help me get my eyes on, Ben began leaving in place patches of morels he'd found, so I could study them where they grew. I found that if I actually got down on the ground I could see the little hats popping up here and there. From above they were invisible. Of course, the ground was thick black mud, but that seemed to be the price you paid for burn morels.

The morning was spent wandering across the steep hillside with our heads down, my gaze locked on a point about six steps in front of me. Wandering around that way, I completely lost track of where I was. To regain my bearings I'd have to stop and look up. The air was foggy and the hills were cut with deep ravines. I often had no idea in which direction the road was or where the others had wandered. Every now and then a burst of static would come over my walkie-talkie: "I've hit a mother lode down here by the creek" or "Where the h.e.l.l are you guys?"

When I did see morels, it didn't feel like I had found them. It felt more like they had decided to show themselves. There's something mushroomers call the "pop-out effect." Here's how it works: When searching for something, you fix its visual pattern in your mind. Then it seems to "pop out" of the background.

FOREST VS. GARDEN.

You don't need to play these tricks when looking for fruits and vegetables. They depend on animals to eat them and spread their seeds, so they have evolved to be noticed. In the garden n.o.body hides; n.o.body means you harm. Everything in the garden (or almost everything) is there because the gardener wants it there.

Morels popping up through a bed of pine needles.

Gathering in the forest is a very different thing. We didn't create the forest. It does not exist for us. The morels would just as soon I pa.s.s them by. Even the bright berries aren't growing there for us. We didn't work to make the forest happen. It's more like we are stealing from it. Alone in the woods, out of earshot of my fellow mushroom hunters, I found myself, idiotically, talking to the morels. Whenever a bunch of them suddenly popped out, I would cry, "Gotcha!" You would never feel like that with an apple tree in an orchard. Of course Of course the apples are there-a farmer planted them. the apples are there-a farmer planted them.

MORELS AND FIRE.

I'd completely lost track of time and s.p.a.ce when my walkie-talkie blurted, "Break for lunch-meet back at the car." I had wandered nearly a mile from the car, mostly downhill. By the time I worked my way back up to the road, the others were standing around munching trail mix. They all had pretty impressive hauls. "You couldn't have picked a better day," Ben gushed when I wandered over with my own bag full of morels. "The mushrooms are so on on today, I've never seen it like this-we're killing them!" today, I've never seen it like this-we're killing them!"

We sat on a charred log (by now we all looked charred ourselves) and ate our lunch, talking about the mushrooms and the people who made their living as mushroom hunters. People have been gathering morels in burned forests forever; Ben mentioned that in Germany long ago people would set forest fires just so they could harvest morels.

Scientists think that morels are a mycorrhizal species that live on the roots of the pine trees. When the pines die in a fire, the fungi face a crisis. Suddenly there are no more roots supplying them with food. So the fungus fruits, sending up morels to release trillions of spores. It is up to the wind to spread the spores far from the blasted forest.

The morels are trying to escape the dying forest. Yet at the same time they also help it grow back. The slightly meaty odor of morels attracts flies, which lay eggs in the safety of the mushroom's hollow stalk. Larvae hatch and feed on the flesh of the morels. Birds then return to the forest to feed on the larvae. The birds drop seeds that sprout on the forest floor, beginning the process of regeneration.

MUSHROOM TREASURE.

After lunch we wandered off on our separate ways again for a few more hours. I worked my way downhill, slip-sliding in the mud and following a stream that led to Beaver Creek. I had no idea where I was or where I was going. I was following the trail of mushrooms. Along Beaver Creek that afternoon the morels were totally on, on, as Ben would say. Almost everywhere I looked the dunce caps appeared, and I filled a bag in less than an hour. I had no idea how deep into the woods I'd wandered, and I was more than a little lost, but not to the morels, who weren't hiding from me any longer. as Ben would say. Almost everywhere I looked the dunce caps appeared, and I filled a bag in less than an hour. I had no idea how deep into the woods I'd wandered, and I was more than a little lost, but not to the morels, who weren't hiding from me any longer.

I felt, again, the grat.i.tude I'd felt in that other forest, the moment that wild pig first appeared to me on the top of that ridge. It can be hard work, hunting and gathering, but if you come away with something, it's almost by chance. You don't feel your hard work has been rewarded. You feel more like you're getting something for nothing. A gift.

Before we climbed into the car to head home, a pa.s.sing hiker took a picture of the four of us holding a crate loaded with morels. From left: me, Paulie, Ben, and Anthony.

By the end of the afternoon we'd all ended up down by Beaver Creek. Around four we made our way back to the car. We changed our soaking socks on the tailgate and filled the entire cargo area of the SUV with morels. We tried as best we could to hide them from view. No reason, really, but a big haul of mushrooms just isn't something you want to advertise. (Earlier that afternoon a couple of mushroom hunters in an old van stopped to ask if I was having any luck. For no good reason I had lied through my teeth.) We'd found sixty pounds of morels, it turned out-a personal best for Anthony and Ben. Before we climbed into the car to head home, we asked a hiker to take a picture of the four of us holding a crate loaded with morels, a huge one propped up on top of the pile. We were filthy and exhausted, but felt rich as kings.

22.

The Perfect Meal Perfect?! A dangerous boast, you must be thinking. And, in truth, my do-it-yourself meal did not come out exactly as I hoped. The dessert, a cherry tart, was slightly burned. The morels were a little gritty. The salt I had gathered in San Francis...o...b..y was too toxic to serve. But for me it was still the perfect meal. A dangerous boast, you must be thinking. And, in truth, my do-it-yourself meal did not come out exactly as I hoped. The dessert, a cherry tart, was slightly burned. The morels were a little gritty. The salt I had gathered in San Francis...o...b..y was too toxic to serve. But for me it was still the perfect meal.

I set the date for the dinner-Sat.u.r.day, June 18-as soon as my animal was in the bag. Wild California pig would be the main course. That gave me a couple of weeks to plan and gather the rest of the menu. I made myself some rules for what I would include.

1. Everything on the menu must have been hunted, gathered, or grown by me.2. Themenushouldincludeatleastoneanimal,vegetable,and fungus, as well as an edible mineral (the salt).3. Everything served must be in season and fresh.4. I would spend no money on the meal, but I could use items I already had in my pantry.5. The guest list was limited to those people who helped me in my foraging and their partners. This included Angelo, Anthony, Richard, and a friend named Sue who took me chanterelle hunting. Plus, of course, my wife, Judith, and son, Isaac. Unfortunately, Jean-Pierre was in France. There would be ten of us in all.6. I would cook the meal myself.

SALT OF THE EARTH.

As with any set of rules, I soon found I needed to break one. The problem was the salt. I had learned that there are still a few salt ponds at the bottom of San Francis...o...b..y. On the Sat.u.r.day before my dinner a very good-natured friend and I drove down to a lonely stretch of sh.o.r.eline beneath the San Mateo Bridge. After an endlesstrekthroughtrash strewn wetlands, we found the salt ponds: rectangular fields of shallow water. The water was the color of strong tea. The sh.o.r.es were littered with garbage. There were soda cans and bottles, car parts and tires, and hundreds of tennis b.a.l.l.s abandoned by dogs. There was everything . . . except salt.

Salt ponds occur naturally in the San Francis...o...b..y, and are also man-made and controlled by levees in order to make commercial salt. Because they are so shallow, algae often grows in them in various bright colors, which you can see from above.

There had been heavy rains all spring, making the ponds deeper than usual. There were no white salt crystals on the rocks, as I'd expected. We ended up filling a couple of soda bottles with the cloudy brown brine. That night, I evaporated the liquid in a pan over a low flame. The kitchen filled with a smelly chemical steam, but after a few hours there was a layer of brown crystals in the bottom of the pan. Once it cooled I managed to sc.r.a.pe out a few tablespoons.

The salt I wound up with was greasy and tasted so much like chemicals that it actually made me gag. Here was a good example of how disgust can save your life. No doubt professional salt gatherers have better ways to purify their salt, but I had no clue what these might be. So I abandoned plans to cook with or serve my own salt, and counted myself lucky to have survived.

PLANNING THE MENU.

Perhaps the hardest rule to obey was the one about freshness. I was trying to bring to the table wild pig, wild mushrooms, fresh local fruit, and garden-picked vegetables all at the same time. Once again I had to bend the rules since there are no good local mushrooms in the Bay Area in June. Luckily I had dried a pound of the morels that I'd gathered the previous month. I decided to use those. (At least I had gathered them myself.) For the appetizer I turned to the garden, where there were fava beans ready to pick. I'd planted them back in November, and by May I had scores of fat glossy pods. The fava is a broad, flat, bright green sh.e.l.ling bean. If picked young and quickly boiled, it has a starchy sweet taste that reminds me of springtime just as much as fresh peas or asparagus. But by June many of my beans were not so young anymore, so I decided to make fava bean toasts. I'd mash the beans with roasted garlic and sage and serve them on toasted rounds of homemade sourdough bread. (The younger, sweeter beans I'd reserve for the pasta.) For a second appetizer, I asked Angelo to bring a block of the pate he'd made from the liver of my pig.

So yes, okay, here was another exception to the rules: Angelo made the pate. I also asked him to make the pasta for the first course: morels sauteed in b.u.t.ter with thyme and, for color, the tiny fava beans, over fresh egg fettuccine.

Wild California pig was the main course, but which cut and how to prepare it? Angelo recommended slowly braising the leg, in his opinion the most flavorful cut. (To braise it, I'd first sear it in a frying pan and then slow roast it in liquid.) I was curious to try the loin, and grilling outdoors over a fire seemed to me more in keeping with the hunter-gatherer theme. Unable to choose between the two approaches, I decided to try both. I would braise the leg in red wine (Angelo's) and homemade stock. The loin I would brine overnight, to keep the lean meat from drying out on the grill, cover it with crushed peppercorns, and then grill it fairly quickly over olive wood.

I wanted to bake my own bread and decided it would be fitting to use wild yeast. That would introduce a second type of fungus to the menu. Yeast is what makes bread dough rise. The yeast eats the sugars in bread dough and, as a by-product, gives off carbon dioxide. The bubbles of gas create little pockets in the dough. That's what gives bread its light and spongy texture. Bakers buy yeast in packets to add to their dough, but there is also wild yeast in the air. I found a recipe that gave instructions for gathering wild yeast, in a process that took several days but didn't sound too difficult.

After the main course there would be a salad. I had originally hoped to make it with foraged wild greens. Earlier in the spring I had found a lush patch of miner's lettuce and wild rapini in the Berkeley Hills, but by June the greens had begun to yellow. I decided to go instead with a simple salad of lettuces from my garden.

That left dessert, and for a while that posed a problem. My plan was to forage fruit, for a tart, from one of the many fruit trees lining the streets in Berkeley. I see no reason why foraging for food should be restricted to the countryside. In the weeks before the dinner I went on several urban scouting expeditions. In other words, I strolled around the neighborhood with a plastic bag. Since moving to Berkeley I've located a handful of excellent fruit trees-plum, apple, apricot, and fig. They all had branches I could reach from public land, but none of them had quite ripened yet.

It was my sister-in-law, Dena, who saved my dessert. She reported that her neighbor's bing cherry tree was so heavy with ripe fruit that several of its branches were at that very moment bending low over her backyard. I checked to make sure it was legal to pick fruit from someone else's tree that is hanging over your yard. It is and I did. Bingo! Bing cherries for my tart.

With dessert I would serve an herbal tea, made from wild chamomile. I'd picked the chamomile flowers in the Berkeley hills earlier in the spring and dried them. Then I mixed them with mint and lemon balm from the garden. I also had a jar of honey made by a friend in town. You could say the honey was foraged too, by the bees who made it.

CHEZ POLLAN.

Now I had my menu and I wrote it out on a card. Being in Berkeley, home to many fine restaurants, I felt compelled to add a few over-the-top menu flourishes: The last item was one of Angelo's homemade wines.

I started cooking Sat.u.r.day's meal on Tuesday morning, when I made the stock and started the wild yeast culture for the bread. For the stock I used bones from both my pig and from a gra.s.s-fed steer. After roasting the bones in the oven for an hour, I simmered them for the rest of the day in a stockpot with the vegetables and some herbs.

Gathering wild yeast turns out to be no big deal. The spores of various yeasts are floating in the air just about everywhere. Collecting them is a matter of giving them a moist place to rest and something to eat. Some species of yeast taste better than others, however, and this is where geography and luck enter in. The Bay Area has a reputation for its sourdough bread, so I figured the air outside my house would be an excellent hunting ground for wild yeast. I made a thick soup of organic flour and spring water. I briefly exposed the mixture to the air on a win dowsill, then sealed it in an airtight container. By the following morning the surface of the chef chef, as it's called, was bubbling like pancake batter on a hot griddle. That was a good sign, because it meant the yeasts were already at work and growing.

Wednesday morning I drove into San Francisco to pick up the meat from Angelo. By the end of the week I had all my ingredients. I'd picked a gallon of cherries, harvested my fava beans, prepared the brine for the pig loin, made the stock, and soaked the dried morels in warm water. On Friday night, when I made a to-do list and schedule for Sat.u.r.day, it hit me just how much I had to do. What was really scary was how much of it I had never done before. That included baking a wild yeast bread and cooking a wild pig two different ways.

I also hadn't added up how many total hours of oven time the meal would require. Braising the pig leg at 250 degrees would take half the day. I didn't see how exactly I could fit in the bread and the tart. For some reason it hadn't dawned on me earlier that I was cooking a very difficult meal for a group of very picky food experts. Now dawn on me it did.

OVER MY HEAD.

To give you an idea of exactly what I'd gotten myself into, here's the schedule I wrote out Friday evening on both sides of an index card:

GIVING THANKS.

That was my plan for Sat.u.r.day in the kitchen. Of course in reality the day unfolded nothing like that neat and orderly schedule. Instead it was a blizzard of rushed work, missing ingredients, unscheduled spills and dropped pots, unscheduled trips to the store, unscheduled pangs of doubt, and second-guessing. There were moments when I sorely wished for another pair of hands, but Judith and Isaac were away all day.

Did I really need to cook the pig two different ways? For dessert, why not just serve the cherries in a bowl? Or open a packet of fast-acting yeast?! Why in the world was I going to quite this much trouble?

When I thought about it, there seemed to be several reasons. This meal was my way of thanking all the people who had helped me with my hunting and gathering adventure. The effort I put into the meal would be a way of showing how much I appreciated what they had done. A bowl of fresh bing cherries is nice, but to turn them into a pastry is surely a more thoughtful gesture. (As long as I didn't blow the crust.) It's the difference between a Hallmark e-card and a handwritten letter.

The work was also a way of honoring the food. All these plants and animals and fungi were being sacrificed to our needs and desires. I wanted to do right by them. I guess I could have made wild boar hamburgers, but that wouldn't have felt like the right thing. Maybe that is one way a cook celebrates the ingredients, by wasting as little as possible and making the most of whatever the food has to offer.