By Anita Odessa
No Room at the Maggot Motel
When people hear that I’m a forager, the first thing they want to know about is mushrooms. The truth is, I initially found the world of fungi intimidating, so aside from having gleaned a basic familiarity with morels and puff balls in childhood playing inmy grandparents’ woods, I didn’t really delve into mushrooms for my first year or so of foraging. That changed abruptly as I was wrapping up an autumn hike one day and heard the squeal of tires and revving of an engine along the dirt road that led to my path.
Until that moment, I had been blissfully alone in the forest. I was not expecting my joyful solitude to be interrupted, much less by a vehicle racing through the trees like it was some kind of getaway car. I was a deer in the woods: I froze and my senses rose to high alert. What on earth was I about to wit-ness? Had somebody robbed a bank? Was the trailhead about to become the shady drop-off point for a drug deal or other treachery? I took a deep breath and stepped forward cautiously, knowing that in only a few metres, I was about to find out.
As I emerged from the trail, a dark minivan skidded to a halt right in front of me, whipping a dense cloud of Ganaraska dust in my face. The driver shut off the engine as someone else quickly jumped out the passenger door. Great. Apparently I was out-numbered.
But the passenger was a pleasant-looking young woman in her twenties who then opened the door to the back seat to gingerly help out an elderly woman. Meanwhile, the driver, who was a woman of about my age, popped the trunk. I braced myself. These women might not look like stereotypical criminals, but what was coming out of that trunk – a body bag? Instead, it was three wicker baskets. I had become the unsuspecting witness of a multigenerational mushroom hunt!
I relaxed and greeted the women, expressing my interest in learning how to forage for wild mushrooms. “You need to be careful,” warned the youngest. “I’ve been doing this with my mother and grandmother since I was a little girl. Would you like to come with us? We’ll show you how.”
You bet I would! For the next hour, three generations of mushroom hunters trained me how to look for boletes, arguably one of nature’s most prized gourmet mushrooms. I was grateful for their expertise, because frankly, with the unappetizing spongy greyish-yellow pores under the boletes’ caps, I never would have recognized those mushrooms as culinary treasures on my own.
When I got home and told my landlady about the adventure, she quickly matched it: she had a friend who could show me wild honey mushrooms, she said, but I would have to be patient. He would let her know when the time was right to pick them.
I waited in anticipation until one morning I got her urgent email. The honey mushrooms were up, but we would have to get there fast! My landlady led the way to her friend’s acreage in her car, while I followed in the dark green Mustang I was driving at the time. To my surprise, she had as heavy a foot as I did– I would fi nd out later that she was a former Mustang driver, herself – and our little convoy tore up the back roads in hot pursuit of gourmet fungi. I felt like Steve McQueen in the action/thriller Bullitt, only our mushroom hunting version would have been called Bolete. How had I lucked out and found a hobby that was best approached as a high speed chase?
Clusters of little brown honey mushrooms were waiting for us in her friend’s backwoods and I picked about a dozen under his tutelage that day. I fried half of them up with butter for dinner and they were delicious. But when I went back to the fridge the next evening to prepare the rest, I found a horror show: overnight, the remaining mushrooms had transformed into writhing maggot motels. The realization that only a night before, similar morsels had been in my mouth was revoltingly hard to swallow.
That experience did a lot to shape how I forage for mushrooms. I know there’s a time to stay patient and a time to pick fast, before too many other critters dive in. I only take what I need – and can commit to eating or preserving within twenty-four hours. Knock on rotting wood, as long as I follow this code, I never check in at the maggot motel.