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Fun look at world of mushrooms
By Miranda Seymour |
November 18, 2011, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
HEDGEHOGS, fairy clubs, hawk's wings and candy caps: These are just a gladeful of the fungal eruptions that have captivated Eugenia Bone, the intrepid author of one of the most beguiling books I've read this year. A generous sprinkling of amateur photos only adds to the charm of "Mycophilia."
Bone figures that 1,000 or so of America's mushroom connoisseurs can be classified as pros: a wandering community of commercial pickers who hunt out harvests of porcini, matsutake and chanterelles from British Columbia to Northern California. (The West Coast comes out tops where North America's mushrooms are concerned.) The remainder - including bankers, surgeons, academics and off-the-gridders - are obsessed (and often pretty delightful) oddballs with whom Bone proves adept at building up a nonchalant rapport.
Take the plaid-shirted mountain man she encounters during a mushroom-seeking flight to Montana, "mashed into his window seat like a raccoon stuffed into a too-small Havahart trap." Along the way, he tells Bone how to stuff morels with cream cheese, crab and shrimp, then "slow smoke 'em over mesquite and serve 'em with elk." But Bone isn't easily upstaged. A few pages later, she casually observes that morels, an edible fungus, on braised cabbage formed part of the last repast of first-class passengers aboard the Titanic.
Weird details, combined with a flair for startling analogies, brighten even the most rambling passages of Bone's book. She may not know precisely how to communicate why it's OK to chew but never digest a deadly Amanita phalloides, but set her on the hunt for fungi in the aftermath of a forest fire, and Bone can make you shiver in the slovenly vacuum of a campsite she compares to a cold fireplace. Follow her, one misty morning, along the path to a forest pool, and she'll paint the scene in one adroit phrase: "Fog hung like laundry over the trails." While not quite a match in pithy summary to Basho, the Japanese mycophile and haiku maker, Bone deploys the precise, uncommon vocabulary of the best naturalists.
Still, why on earth would we novices, while happy to let Bone and her chums traipse the woods and mountaintops, want to read about what, for most of us, is best enjoyed on butter-drenched toast? Do we thrill to the news that eating a candy cap mushroom can cause every pore of the body to exude the scent of maple sugar? Do we really want to know that a single mushroom, three to four inches across, can produce 100 million spores in an hour - and that if all the 14 trillion spores of a basketball-size giant puffball bore fruit, the earth would be knocked out of its orbit? Does it intrigue us to learn that of the 1.5 million species of fungi that exist, only five percent have been identified?
The answer, is yes. Bone's enthusiasm would prompt even the most languid armchair ecologist to take a new interest in the role played on our planet by mushrooms.
Bone figures that 1,000 or so of America's mushroom connoisseurs can be classified as pros: a wandering community of commercial pickers who hunt out harvests of porcini, matsutake and chanterelles from British Columbia to Northern California. (The West Coast comes out tops where North America's mushrooms are concerned.) The remainder - including bankers, surgeons, academics and off-the-gridders - are obsessed (and often pretty delightful) oddballs with whom Bone proves adept at building up a nonchalant rapport.
Take the plaid-shirted mountain man she encounters during a mushroom-seeking flight to Montana, "mashed into his window seat like a raccoon stuffed into a too-small Havahart trap." Along the way, he tells Bone how to stuff morels with cream cheese, crab and shrimp, then "slow smoke 'em over mesquite and serve 'em with elk." But Bone isn't easily upstaged. A few pages later, she casually observes that morels, an edible fungus, on braised cabbage formed part of the last repast of first-class passengers aboard the Titanic.
Weird details, combined with a flair for startling analogies, brighten even the most rambling passages of Bone's book. She may not know precisely how to communicate why it's OK to chew but never digest a deadly Amanita phalloides, but set her on the hunt for fungi in the aftermath of a forest fire, and Bone can make you shiver in the slovenly vacuum of a campsite she compares to a cold fireplace. Follow her, one misty morning, along the path to a forest pool, and she'll paint the scene in one adroit phrase: "Fog hung like laundry over the trails." While not quite a match in pithy summary to Basho, the Japanese mycophile and haiku maker, Bone deploys the precise, uncommon vocabulary of the best naturalists.
Still, why on earth would we novices, while happy to let Bone and her chums traipse the woods and mountaintops, want to read about what, for most of us, is best enjoyed on butter-drenched toast? Do we thrill to the news that eating a candy cap mushroom can cause every pore of the body to exude the scent of maple sugar? Do we really want to know that a single mushroom, three to four inches across, can produce 100 million spores in an hour - and that if all the 14 trillion spores of a basketball-size giant puffball bore fruit, the earth would be knocked out of its orbit? Does it intrigue us to learn that of the 1.5 million species of fungi that exist, only five percent have been identified?
The answer, is yes. Bone's enthusiasm would prompt even the most languid armchair ecologist to take a new interest in the role played on our planet by mushrooms.
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