A Pig in Provence (10 page)

By the time Donald insisted we head back, my basket was filled with mushrooms in shades of blue, gray, purple, tan, gold,
white, and brown. I had picked at least a few of everything I had found, just in case they were edible, leaving behind those that were obviously too old and were rotting or slimy.

As soon as we got home I went next door to Georgette’s and showed her my collection. She quickly sorted through them, tossing aside most of them, leaving a dozen or so behind. I had indeed found
chanterelles. “Pas mal,
pas mal,” she said as she turned each of the four over and over in her hand, inspecting them before going on to the next. “These are
cèpes
, the very best, and you have sanguins too. Good, good for you. Bravo.” Then she turned to the discards, telling me none were deadly, but none were good to eat either.

“How about this one?” I pulled the big red one out of my bag.

“Oh, c
’est l’horreur! Ce n’est pas bon du tout, du tout.
It’s not good at all, not at all! It’s
le bolet de satan!
It will make you very, very sick if you eat it. Go wash your hands right away. At least you didn’t keep it with the others!” She smiled as I nodded knowingly.

“You knew it was bad, didn’t you?” I thought she seemed proud of me. “Here, take your mushrooms, and clean them like I showed you. Make an
omelette
with these,” she said, indicating the
chanterelles,
“and a sauce for a beefsteak with the rest.”

Donald lit a fire in our kitchen’s woodstove and we all set about the task of cleaning our mushrooms. I put out some bread, olive oil, and fresh goat cheese for us to snack on because it was already late and we were hungry. I carefully sliced our
chanterelles
into long, perfect sections and sautéed them in olive oil with a few shallots, salt, and pepper. As they cooked, they scented our little kitchen with an unfamiliar aroma, slightly musty and rich.
When they became tender, I poured a half-dozen beaten eggs over them and sprinkled on parsley. I let the bottom of the eggs set, then flipped one half over the other, cooking the omelette until it was firm, but still soft in the middle. I quickly made a salad from greens I had picked earlier that day, and we sat down to our first home-cooked meal of gathered wild mushrooms.

The next day I made a
fricassée
with the
cèpes
and
sanguins,
sautéing them together with garlic, onions, and butter until they were lightly browned. I added some white wine to deglaze the pan, and followed that with some fresh curds and a few crushed wild juniper berries to make a sauce. The
cèpes
smelled very different from the
chanterelles,
having more of a woodland perfume aroma. I wanted to serve the sauce over steak, as Georgette suggested, but pasta, topped with some grated
Gruyère,
was a good substitute for the more expensive steak.

I went mushroom hunting almost daily thereafter until the first frosts came in early November and the season ended. We ate wild mushrooms in some form or another almost every day, but my favorites were, and still are,
cèpes
and
chanterelles
braised with rabbit and black olives, and the mixtures of different kinds, whatever the forest yields, simply sautéed in butter, wine, and garlic and heaped on top of grilled toasts or added to salads.

I became such a successful hunter-gatherer, as did Ethel and Donald, that we had to dry some of our
sanguins
or watch them spoil. We simply couldn’t eat them all fresh in the quantities we found. Marie, another neighbor, showed Ethel and me how to dry them. After we cleaned the mushrooms we sliced them and threaded the slices onto long strings with a needle. We proudly hung festoons of mushrooms on rafters near the woodstove to dry before we packed them into tins for storage.

The passion for mushroom hunting that is so evident in Provence is rooted partially in the collective memory, when la cueillette formed an essential element in the diet of rural families, and partially in the love of hunting and gathering, which connects the Provençaux to nature and the land, even if they live in cities.

In the old days, knowing the special spots where mushrooms could be found provided a sense of food security, not unlike having rabbits in hutches or vegetables in the garden, along with a bit of a smug triumph when trumping a neighbor or relative with an especially large or laudable haul. If the sense of food security is no longer a driving force behind the hunt, the sense of triumph and the meal to come still are.

This was brought home to me not long ago when a friend’s very wealthy Parisian brother and his wife were visiting, and they all went up to the hills near Aiguines, above the Lac de Sainte-Croix, to hunt mushrooms.

“Look at this! I hear you like to go mushroom hunting, so we just had to come and show you what we found,” the wife said, dropping her Armani coat on my chair. She put a large basket filled with fungi on my table and began pulling out the best specimens first, waving big, fat, perfect
cèpes
and handfuls of golden
chanterelles
under my nose, then pulling them back. As she dug through her basket, big diamond and gold rings glittered on her fingers, incongruous with the dirt beneath her nails and smudged on her hands.

I asked her, half joking, “And which ones are for me?”

“Mais non, Madame,”
she responded with a shocked air. “Not for you at all. These are mine. We will cook them tonight, first a
brouillé,
then tomorrow a
fricassée,
I think.”

“Quite a prize, for the Parisienne, don’t you think? My grandmother, after all, came from a farm in the Languedoc, and I know a few things about
la cueillette,
right,
chérie?”
She turned to her husband as she repacked all her prizes into her basket and put her coat back on.

“Well, ah, thank you for your visit. You certainly had a very good day. Beautiful mushrooms, and
bon appétit.”
I closed the door behind them, somewhat dismayed that the visit had simply been to gloat, not to share. Just one of those fat
cèpes
or two or three of the
chanterelles
would have been just right to go with my dinner. Instead, I studded the pork loin I had bought that morning with garlic, and ground some fresh bay leaf and juniper together to rub on it. The potatoes I cooked with the pork were newly dug, and I sautéed some spinach before adding a little
crème fraîche.
It was a delicious meal, but those mushrooms would have made a good pan sauce for the pork.

While mushroom hunting is an intense, recreational pastime in Provence, it is also big business, as it is elsewhere in France, with thousands of tons being gathered and sold every year. Many people, especially in the still relatively unpopulated, forested areas of Haute-Provence, supplement their income by gathering mushrooms and selling them to brokers, who in turn sell them to large firms from where they make their way to markets throughout the world, to be sold fresh, or to be dried, canned, or otherwise preserved. It is not a small thing.

Recognizing the economic importance to the
commune,
or administrative district, and the role that mushrooms still play in the food of rural life, communal forests especially thick with fungi
are posted off-limits to nonlocals:
“Cueillette de champignons inter- dite sauf aux habitants de commune.”
This gave our friends Mark and Nina Haag, who lived in the mountains, a slight advantage.

It was at their house that I first experienced
la cueillette
for profit, slightly more than five years after Georgette introduced me to wild mushroom hunting. Mark and Nina, American friends from our early days in Provence, now kept goats and made goat’s-milk cheese after buying a small farmhouse and more than sixty hectares of land in the mountains northwest of Nice in the Alpes-Maritimes. Their place was so remote that it was accessible only by narrow footpaths, an hour’s climb from the last house in the tiny perched village of La Baume, five kilometers from Annot. Ethel and Oliver loved to visit them, finding their lack of electricity and plumbing exciting, and although I often moaned about the long, steep climb, they scampered ahead through the bracken, eager to see the donkey Mark and Nina kept, and to play with the sheepdogs and goats. This time, we were no more than a couple hundred meters into the forest when we were greeted with a large sign forbidding mushroom collection except for locals. We saw several more postings as we made our way higher and deeper into the forest, following the rutted footpath as it cut through the hardwood forest.

Before the countryside was decimated by two world wars and a pandemic flu, dozens of farmhouses and tiny hamlets stretched across the mountains, all linked by footpaths, shared work, and marriages. By the time Mark and Nina bought their farmhouse in 1975, the forests and weather had reclaimed most of the abandoned stone structures, including many terraces built on the sloping hillsides to grow chestnut trees, once an important crop for the inhabitants.

We arrived, me out of breath, hot, and sweaty, to find Mark waiting for us. He wanted to hurry, telling us that the mushroom-hunting season was early this year and Nina was already out. I leapt at the opportunity. I hadn’t been mushroom hunting in Provence since the fall Oliver was born. Now, he was five years old and intrigued by the idea of hunting mushrooms. Ethel informed him she knew all about it.

After a drink of cold water drawn from their well, we set out, the dogs following us. I found I wasn’t so tired after all and was excited about looking for mushrooms again. Mark strode across the pastures he had cut out of the forests, leading us up into the high chestnut terraces, about a half-hour climb beyond their house. “It’s going to be a great year, just like the last. Nina sold more than four kilos of
cèpes
last year. This year she’s already sold about fifty kilos and the season’s just started.”

“Where does she sell them?” I tried to imagine how she would have gone about transporting such heavy loads of mushrooms down the twisting path to the village.

“There’re brokers who come to Annot. There’s always one or more around. Pay cash too. The
cèpes
brought in enough money last year to buy two donkeys and a used Renault.”

We stood under the chestnut trees whose thick canopies cast the molding leaves, moss, and crumbling stone walls in even darker tones. My nose tickled with the dampness and the smell of the hidden mushrooms. The dense sponge of decaying matter sighed and gave way as I stepped across it, head down, looking for fungi.

“Look. There’re some right there.” Mark strode toward a swollen hump of leaves. He flipped their mass away with the stick he was carrying, exposing a cluster of firm, rounded, russet
brown mushroom caps. Oliver knelt down to touch them, Ethel right behind him.

Mark turned to me. “Do you want to cut them?” He handed me his knife.

“Thanks. I have my own knife.” I bent down, brushed the remaining leaves aside, and cut through the thick bulbous stems of some of the finest
cèpes
of my mushroom hunting-experience, past or present.

“See,” I said to Ethel and Oliver, “you don’t want to pull them up because that would take away the spores, the things like little seeds, that make them grow. If you cut them like this”—I handed him the mushrooms, showing him the ends—”more will come back next year and next and probably forever.” I was conscious that I was teaching my children what Georgette had taught me, showing them another world and way of life.

“Forever?” Oliver asked, holding the bouquet of mushrooms in his little hands. “Well, at least for a long time,” I replied.

“I already know not to pull them up,” Ethel said. “I remember from when we used to go in our forest with the goats.”

“Can I go look by myself?” Oliver asked, waving a small dry branch around.

“Me, too,” said Ethel. “Come on, Oliver, I’ll show you.”

“Wait,” I cried, as they ran off across the broken terraces, “don’t pull them up, remember. And don’t eat any! Call me or Dad or Mark to bring a knife. And watch out for the stones!”