Cepes Season in the foret domaniale de Saint-Germain-en-Laye

Cèpes Season in the forêt domaniale de Saint-Germain-en-Laye

by Brian Van der Horst 

 

Dr Maury, a trim, bespectacled man of serious style in coat and tie is my local pharmacist in Le Mesnil-le-Roi. He is ready to put up his annual window display of mushrooms from the local woods.  In France, at nearly every rural drugstore, at least one employee is a mycological specialist, and traditionally helps the townspeople sort the toxic species from les comestibles. Across the street is the Forest of St. Germaine.  If you look at any of the guides to mushroom hunting, they invidiously point here, revealing the best spots in our forest to harvest the cèpe, that meaty paragon of fungi that tastes like woodsy filet mignon.  Thus, French from all over the county, like vigilante migrant harvesters, are beginning to be seen in my local stand of trees, 200 meters from my front door.

You can’t blame them, what with cèpes (Botulis edulis)  going for up to 40 euros a kilo at the local marché. These mushrooms contain more protein than any other vegetable. In the U.S., they are known by their Italian name, porcini. Jean-Phillipe, my voisin de palier has generously knocked on my door this morning, and we start wandering the musty leaf-strewn forest floors beneath chestnut and walnut trees. We have harvested two kilos in less than an hour.  And this is a scarce day.

 

“La folie des champignons” has produced wild battles in France against unauthorized pickers in recent years. In the South, guards were hired to protect forests either owned or appropriated by local farmers. Newspapers reported noses broken, tourists insulted, windscreens smashed and tires slashed. Fines of up to €300 and penalties of  €1,500  were levied on professional traffickers. According to the NY Times, about 120 companies trade in wild mushrooms in France, paying pickers to find between 5,000 and 10,000 tons a year.

 

 

But here in the Yvellines, West of Paris, the Forest of St. Germaine is hospitably bucolic. Dr. Maury is teaching me how to distinguish what is eatable from what is toxic.  I trust him with my life now.

 

While he was on vacation in august, I had a small récolte vetted by two other pharmacists.  They were delicious cooked in butter and garlic, with a drizzle of olive oil to prevent the butter from burning.  Several minutes sizzling in the pan renders an ambrosial feast. Two hours after ingesting a sumptuous portion, I was seeing geometric hallucinations.   It passed in a couple hours, but for a while I was wondering what this meal would cost me in nausea, reduced kidney or liver functions, or paralysis�"some of the joys of ingenuous mushrooming.

 

 

 

So when Dr. Maury came back, I quickly apprenticed myself to his wisdom.  To motivate him I gave him a copy of the mushroom identification computer program I found on the internet published by Cornell University. I promised him that once he identified a species for me; I would only bring him new varieties to add to his prodigious collection. And I started finding them, red-capped emetics, deadly amanitas, surprisingly eatable purple beauties. Weeks ago a novice, I have begun learning the poetry of typing mushroom cap, stalk and teeth; scale, veil and spores; rings, margins and tubes.

And in a marvelous serendipity,  my next-door neighbor Jean-Philippe turns out to have gone to school as a youth with Dr. Maury; moreover his knowledge is more of the terrain. Mushrooms have their seasons, and weekly cycles. The best time to find them is just after the full moon. Two days of rain, followed by at least 2 days of sunlight, and you see the little critters popping up like figurines in a Whack-a-mole arcade game.

 

Jean-Phillipe teaches me to look in the areas where ferns grow�"indicating copious ground moisture.  But not where they grow densely, but where they are scattered sparsely, to give the young spores more sunlight. That too, explains Jean-Pierre, is why they grow freely alongside the trails and pathways criss-crossing the forest. “They need oxygen to breath.” 

Finding bent fronds is bad augure: someone else has passed.  If one breaks strings of spider webs across their face�"that’s good. It means that no one has hunted this patch of ground this morning.

 

Footprints of wild boars are good omens as well. But here my experts diverge.

Dr. Maury says the sangliers are only rooting for worms.  Jean-Philippe says they also eat mushrooms.  They are not fools, he reminds me. For centuries in the South of France, farmers have used pigs to snuff out those diamonds of fungi: the mythic truffle.

 

Great slimy red slugs are other pathfinders. Unfortunately, they usually get to the largest, most succulent specimens before we do. Their children often have colonized what their parents have left us.

 

 

There are about thousand mushroom hunters in this country, where 4% of the national population actually work in agriculture, and 98% feel they are inimically tied to the land. Like Rousseau, the French feel their deepest roots are in Nature,“Le bonheur est dans les champs.”

 

Jean-Philippe and I exchange mushroom lore.  I, a former marine biologist turned cognitive scientist, once reported the findings of psycho-pharmacologist Ronald K. Seigel, who discovered the subjective structure of most human hallucinations�"what forms most people see in trances, drug reveries, meditation.  Seigel demonstrated how if one ingested psilocybin mushrooms from Mexico, one saw Mayan motifs in one’s visions.  If they came from North West America, totem pole decorations populated your hallucinations. Fungi found in Thailand produced Asian designs.

 

Were the art styles of each culture suggested by these plants?  Author, philosopher and ethnobiologist Terrence McNally proposed that mushroom intoxication was a rare example of inter-species and inter-phylum communication.  The mushrooms are telling us how the plant kingdom thinks.

 

Perhaps even more:  Ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson pointed toward the use of magic mushrooms in ancient India, Russia and South America, and wondered if these experiences were the inception of the human concept of gods.

No matter, it is a beautiful morning in Le Mesnil-le-Roi.  On this side of the forest, the fungi grow in a wild profusion of colors. Red cepes, violet cortinaire, white pom-poms of vessie de loup lie scattered like golf balls on a driving range. Bright orange taffeta curtains of wood mushroom stand boldly on tree stumps.

 

 

 Just our luck that those gorgeous cèpes are so good at camouflage. We have to widen our vision, let our minds relax, watch for those caps emerging from the detritus as the sunlight dances in the swirling leaves of a golden autumn.

 

 No doubt about it, this is certainly a religious experience for the French.

 

 

 

Reviews

[Vishuddha]

Even before reading this, I would not presume to know nor, would I dare to try. I would not like to die, on a couch, with a piece of purple mushroom in my belly although Graham Hancock says it was the beginning of religion. He too says places have their own spirits. Did you have French hallucinations, like lace or rose buds, tied up with pink ribbons? I would not even lick a mushroom if I did not know its name. I suppose it is different if you have been properly introduced. I have mushrooms which grow by my front gate that are of such a vivid orange I am frightened of them. But, your writing was a delight, although I was going to cook mushrooms tonight but now, I don't know ...