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August 31, 1999
If it rains on Tuesday you can bet that Saturday will bring mushroom madness
to our mountainside. Caravans from Parma or La Spezia or even from as far
away as Lucca and Pisa will stop and park on the side of road and from them
will emerge whole families of mushroom hunters: grandparents and parents and
children and pets, straw baskets strapped across their backs and walking
sticks in hand. The locals hate these roadside raiders. Collecting porcini
accounts for a good chunk of their supplemental income (especially the
elderly, retired folk) and in many of the little villages it's against the
law for non-residents to pick them. However, the state road is open
territory and so these big-city types take the opportunity to enjoy some
wholesome, quality time together in the great outdoors while maybe making an
extra buck-- or at least collecting enough mushrooms for their winter pantries.
Myself, I'm sick of mushrooms-- not so much the eating of them as the
talking about them. If it's a particularly rainy year, as this year has
been, then everybody you meet will ask you everyday, "are you going for
mushrooms? Did you find any mushrooms?" And if you happen to find
mushrooms they will want to know where you found them, but you're never
supposed to tell where. Because if you tell, I'm told, then everyone will
know where you get them and will beat you to them next time. Instead,
you're supposed to wave your hand around and say vague things like, "oh, I
found them down there by that grove there" or "I found them in those woods
over there." Everybody has a secret spot where they find their mushrooms,
which seems ridiculous as you can hardly walk a yard without trampling on
the things.
Now that Georgia has gone home I'm as bored as ever and so this afternoon
I'm watching Pierra, my neighbor, slice the mushrooms that her husband,
Alberto, has gathered that morning. She slices them thin and then sets them
on screens to dry in the sun. I ask her what she'll do with them. Well,
she says, Alberto won't eat them, so she'll try to sell them to the
restaurant where her sister works. In the next village, Renato's aunts are
doing the same: picking, slicing, and drying hundreds of mushrooms they've
collected that nobody wants to eat. Luckily, Renato's Uncle Gulliermo is
"Il Re Dei Funghi" (The Mushroom King), a distributor of mushrooms and other
local food products, so he'll buy up any surplus and cart them off to the
big cities in lower Tuscany.
Renato and Renato (father and son) come home from their afternoon walk with
a huge yellow/orange mushroom that is not a Porcino. Renato the elder
thinks it's an Ovalo and looks it up in his "Conoscere I Funghi"
("Recognizing Mushrooms") book. The book shows pictures of various
mushrooms and tells you whether or not they're edible. Renato says these
mushrooms are very rare and seems especially proud of his find after showing
me a picture with a caption that says these are excellent for eating. The
picture resembles the yellow/orange mushroom, but who knows for sure? My
son seems caught up in this mushroom madness, too, but my mother always told
me not to eat mushrooms that I found growing in the wild (mushrooms growing
in the wilds of Flushing, NY were bound to kill you). I'd rather get the
expert opinion of Il Re Del Funghi, so we store the treasure in a plastic
bag until we have a chance to go see Uncle Gu.
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