Eat Arkansas

An elderly Polish Canadian friend of mine once took me on numerous mushroom hunts when I was teaching in northern Ontario one summer. The mushrooms he pounced on were of the boletus type--with spongy undersides, rather than gills. They're what the French call cepe and the Germans Steinpilz.

My Polish-Canadian friend claims that ALL boletus mushrooms are edible, though some are, he admits, "mildly poisonous." I spot boletus aplenty in the woods in Arkansas at certain times of the year, but don't have the courage to pick and eat them. Before I pop any mushroom in my mouth, I'd prefer to have someone who really, really knows its identity assure me it's safe to eat.

If the boletus in our woods are edible, then we have quite a treasure at our boot tips. My elderly friend strings them and dries them for winter use. At the same time he picks boletus, he also harvests the wild blueberries that are abundant in his area, covering them for about a year with vodka, then carefully draining off the elixir. He claims that his secret to remarkable health is the one glass he drinks daily of this potion: and it must work, since he's now in his late 90s and still going strong, foraging for mushrooms and berries, traveling by donkey in the outback of Ethiopia in the summer.

It seems like there are mushrooms everywhere this year -- in places I've never seen them before. Is there something about the weather that is making them more abundant?

I think a combination of cooling temperatures and moisture causes any kind of fungus--including mushrooms--to proliferate, Kelly.

And some mushrooms seem to prefer certain kinds of soil. The boletus I was describing above seems to have a liking for oak trees, of which Arkansas surely has an abundance (that is, I often spot it under oaks).

No way in hell I'd eat a mushroom I picked myself.

Here (again, as I recall) is the Moosewood Cookbook's recipe for Hungarian Mushroom soup, a favorite.

Only you should double the recipe.

I pretty much agree, Hugh. There was a time when I had a lot more courage and used Billie Jo Tatum's cookbook and guide to natural foods in AR to spot and eat anything I could forage.

Had some interesting results doing that--as in when I assumed that if ginger tea is good for a cold, wild ginger root (found in many places in AR) would also be good.

Not so. After brewing the tea and promptly throwing up, I looked up the root and found it's used as a purgative.

Admittedly, though, I do already have a predisposition for eating from the wild, since my family relished poke sallet, pecans we harvested in the wild, black walnuts, the occasional chinquapin (still to be found when I was growing up), and the wild plums and berries that seemed a lot more abundant across the state when I was little.

But re: mushrooms, I'm leery. The fact that my elderly Polish Canadian friends says some boleti are only "mildly poisonous" is not at all encouraging!

You're right to be leery, muddling, as anyone without experience and prudence should be when considering a meal of wild mushrooms. There are some very toxic species in Arkansas. Many boletes in this state are edible, I'm told, but I seldom find one that hasn't already been partially eaten by bug larvae. I'll take my protein elsewhere, thanks.

Beginners should be wary and depend on an experienced person to introduce specific edible species to them. A chanterelle is as different from a destroying angel as a peach is different from an osage orange, but it is important to know something about both the thing you want to eat and the thing (or things) you might mistake it for. There is no single rule to follow. Though there is a lot to learn, experience takes the guesswork out of it, and if you're guessing you'd better not be eating.

A cool thing happens when you learn to positively identify a choice edible- a little "aha!" in the reptilian core of your brain tickles the remnants of the hunter-gatherer in you and it can be as satisfying as any other experience in nature. And they're tasty, too.

Way back in my college days I was on a field trip with Dr. Tom Clark's Plant Ecology class from Hendrix. We were in the depths of Crowley's Ridge somewhere near Helena surveying huge butternut hickories and shumard's oak trees when we came upon a massive patch of morrell mushrooms. Dr. Clark said "if only we had some way to get these back home" and for some reason I had a leaf bag folded up in my back pocket. I said "will this work?" and we commensed to picking. We halfway filled up the leaf bag and he had the small class over for dinner a few days later. I'll never forget Dr. Clark, who died a few years later, nor will I ever forget the taste of morrell mushrooms dredged in seasoned flour and lightly sauted in butter.

Joe, just when I had hoped my brain was evolving beyond its reptilian core....

I agree with you about the danger of harvesting wild mushrooms you don't know with absolute certainty. The boletes I see around Arkansas almost always do have worms, too, especially when the weather is wet and they've grown to a very large size.

I grew up having quite a bit of confidence at spotting wild food, since my father and a maternal aunt were both avid outdoors types who taught me to pick and eat all kinds of wild berries and leaves.

But I also learned early on that chinquapins have to be picked carefully, or they'll tear a finger, and that blackberry patches often hide snakes (and almost always are full of chiggers), or that a pre-frost persimmon is an unpleasant experience. When I was younger, though, I was more venturesome about trying out about anything I could identify.

But never mushrooms. They're just way too hard to identify, even when you have pictures of them, and they can appear different at different stages of their development.

Edward McCrady, one-time Vice Chancellor of the University of the South (Sewanee), was a latter-day Renaissance man--gentleman, scientist, architect, musician, you name it. Besides running the university and its Biology department, he also designed the completion of Sewanee's magnificent Gothic chapel, he designed his own house, hand-carved the mantel around his fireplace, painted the lovely oil portrait of his wife that hung over it and, just for fun, designed and built with his own hands a unique, brick spiral staircase that descended from the kitchen to the basement.

Dr McCrady once claimed to me that he had tasted more "poisonous" mushrooms than any man alive, and I tended to believe him. I expect the emphasis should be on "tasted", as he admitted some of them did produce toxic, though obviously non-fatal, reactions. Quite a remarkable person.

Another person whose judgment regarding edible mushrooms and other plants was my German landlady, whose father had been a naturalist and landscaper. Frau Probst made regular trips to the woods to bring back lovely things to cook for her family and me. She also kept a supply of dried mushrooms of a certain shelf-like variety which were brought out for evenings on the deck. She would light one edge of one and allow the flame to die down to a smoking ember. One or two were placed strategically (and safely) around the deck to produce a light, somewhat aromatic smoke, which she claimed kept away mosquitoes and other flying pests. They seemed to work.

Just some vague, nostalgic reminiscences of mushroom lore.

Oops, insert "in whose judgment, etc, I WOULD TRUST ... ". Don't know how I missed that in reading the preview.

When I was living in the Chicago area in the 70's mushroom hunting was a popular weekend outdoors activity. One Sunday the Tribune had a big story in their features section or Sunday magazine on the subject, complete with a full-page color photo grid of the edible varieties as well as one of the poisonous types. Someone in the layout dept. reversed the captions on the photos...showing all the edible types to be poisonous and vice/versa for the toxic ones. Major news story in the paper a few days later to try to get the word out on the mixup!

Great reminiscences, widj. The Germans do have that love of mushrooms and the lore handed down in their culture. I've been in the area of the Black Forest when mushroom season was taking place, and it's thick with people harvesting Steinpilzen to dry for soups.

My Polish Canadian friend claims that all cultures can be divided into mycophiles and mycophobes. His theory is that the Eastern and Central Europeans are distinct from the Western Europeans in their willingness to hunt for wild mushrooms and try out as many as they know are good to eat.

I have to admit that, though I love mushrooms, I fall on the -phobe side of the line, with my British Isle-roots. That is, I just don't have confidence to try wild mushrooms out when I don't absolutely know what I'm trying. And I'm a bit suspicious of the "only mildly poisonous" claim....

MysteryShopper, glad the mushroom pictures got sorted out--but I wonder how many people may have ended up eating the wrong ones on the basis of the first photos?

I never thought much about the perils of harvesting wild foods until I talked once to a friend in NC who produced pamphlets and newspaper articles to guide folks in this area.

He told me that because poke sallet is called, well, sallet, they routinely had people calling them after eating RAW pokeweed. I find that hard to imagine, since I was taught from the time I was little that the plant is poisonous--including the berries--and that, before eating it (preferably cooked down and then pressed free of juice and added to scrambled eggs with crumbled bacon), one had to parboil the leaves and pour off the first water.

One more thing. During the survival phase of my Army basic training, we were taught some rules of thumb for determining whether a strange fruit or plant was edible. In the end, though, we were advised that, in a pinch, we could eat *anything* to avoid starvation, as long as it was boiled and drained at least three times, and I was reminded of my childhood lessons regarding pokeweed.

We all agreed that boiling something three times wasn't likely to leave much to taste, but if you're starving, I imagine taste wouldn't be a top priority.

Widj, what you say makes intuitive sense to me, though I think there may be plants that might be deceptively mild when parboiled, and might still retain toxins.

If I remember correctly, the native Americans often ground acorns and then placed them in deerhide bags and left the bags in running streams to leach out the tannic acid. At that point--or so I've read--the nuts produced a delicious and nourishing meal that was used quite a bit in native American cooking.

I read an interesting duo of novels this year by Maria Doria Russell, in which a new planet is discovered and first explored by Jesuit missionaries and their companions. One of the problems the explorers had to contend with in the novel is how to determine whether entirely unknown flora and fauna are or are not edible.

The novel made me think about how, in our ancient prehistory, our early ancestors decided that this or that foodstuff may be eaten. In the novel (and, I suspect, in our own prehistory), one method of selection was simply to discard immediately anything that produced a reaction on the tongue or tasted vile in the mouth. Another was to observe what happened to the member of the group who ate the new plant.

I suspect most anything--grass, even--would be edible if boiled long enough. Thank goodness that we don't live in a culture where such horrible choices face us--at least, not yet. Maybe those of us with a bit of traditional Southern folklore in our past would have an edge at survival, if it came to having to live on weeds and berries and whatever animals we could trap to survive.