http://www.boston.com/news/local/article..._thrive?mode=PF
It's fall, and in the city's littered wilds, wild mushrooms, of all things, thrive
By Janice O'Leary, Globe Correspondent | November 6, 2005
Lawrence Millman kneels in the mulch, examining the flaccid remnants of a stinkhorn mushroom, renowned for its whiff of carrion. Surrounded by oaks, pines, and chain-link fences, the 57-year-old veteran mycologist is so absorbed by his find that he might as well be deep in the bowels of a national forest rather than a few feet from the traffic hurtling along Fresh Pond Parkway.
When he spots an immature stinkhorn, an ''egg" pushing up through the decaying leaves, he digs it out carefully with his woodsman's knife, slices it in half, and carves out the hard, white center. Then he pops a piece into his mouth.
''Tastes like a radish," he says.
Many in the group of novices following Millman on a walk sponsored by the Friends of Fresh Pond Reservation watch with a mix of horror and eagerness as he chops the remainder of the egg into pieces and holds them out for the brave to try. Several do, nodding and murmuring. ''Not bad," offers one burly man.
Foraging for wild mushrooms may evoke scenes from the woods of Vermont or the French countryside. But Boston or its urban environs? Absolutely, if you know your 'shrooms.
Especially in the fall, particularly this fall, with as much rain as this season has dumped. Rubbery flowers, in many edible and psychedelic permutations, can be found now blooming all around Boston.
''From September through November, there are incredible fruitings of mushrooms in the woods around Boston and throughout New England," says Millman, a Cambridge writer and arctic explorer who cautions that poisonous mushrooms have no common features and that many look-alikes have fooled specialists into thinking they were edible.
Mushrooms flourish in the fall, when most vegetative life begins to die or go dormant, because trees quit putting their energy into photosynthesis and store nutrients in their roots. Fungi feed off those roots.
The microscopic, stringy mycelium, the vegetative part of the mushroom, lives beneath the ground and, in a symbiotic relationship, wraps itself around a tree's root hairs, providing nitrogen and phosphates and receiving sugars.
The mycelia of some mushrooms, such as the chicken of the woods or the hen of the woods, have more of an adversarial relationship with trees. They degrade wood, causing brown or white rot in the tree.
But Millman sees this in the positive light of recycling. ''If it weren't for fungi," he says, ''the planet would be one vast garbage heap."
Some mycologists in the area use their expertise for profit. Foraging for edibles can be a lucrative trade: a pound of hen of the woods mushrooms can command as much as $15 at local restaurants, more than a choice cut of meat. In Japan, they're so prized, they go for about $100 a pound.
Others, like Millman, scout for the fleshy autumn fungi more for their own indulgence, to admire their beauty or sink their teeth into.
Millman calls the foul-smelling stinkhorn ''charismatic" and another typically stemless species ''fiendishly intelligent" for growing a stem to gain a reproductive advantage. He also speaks fondly of others, such as the poisonous death cap and destroying angel mushrooms.
''They're a kind of Darwinian control," he says, ''winnowing out stupidity from humanity."
After admiring the saucer-sized burgundy tops on a few fresh wine caps within view of the Alewife T station, Millman can't help but pluck a few, gingerly placing them in a brown paper bag.
''My fee," he says of the walk sponsored by the Friends of Fresh Pond Reservation. ''I'd give them a B to a B-plus for eating. They have a real hearty, spudsy flavor."
He suggests sauteing them ''three to four minutes in butter, a bit of soy sauce, a drop of vinegar, and a few shreds of garlic."
When someone in the group discovers a damp twig covered with a pink ruffle of fungus, Millman snaps open a microscope lens hanging around his neck. The split gill, which he likens to a Japanese fan, is the most common fungi in the world, found everywhere from Borneo to the Arctic. ''It has made the most of its 21,000 genders," he says. ''It reproduces by the fusion of hyphal filaments (part of the mycelium), which in this case consists of 21,000 types, or genders.
''Such matings make me think of the world beneath us as a vast underground singles bar," he says.
Across town in Olmsted Park in Jamaica Plain, William Neill, a former president of the 110-year-old Boston Mycological Club, traipses through woods scattered with matted, molding sweatpants, felt blankets, a nip bottle, and plastic Shaw's bags, to discover a rare cluster of laughing gym mushrooms in a hollowed-out beech stump. They're a pale, pumpkin color, and not especially tasty.
The bitter fruit is valued for something other than its gustatory pleasures. Neill explains that eating it makes people laugh. A lot. And it's not illegal.
''I have a friend who is always looking for these," he says, noting its ability to induce something approaching euphoria.
Another mycologist, George Riner, of the Boston Mycological Club, calls the laughing gym ''the magic kool-aid mushroom."
Neill is looking for the hen of the woods, an edible mushroom so delicious that chefs around town can't get enough of them, he says. Apparently, neither can mushroom hunters in Jamaica Plain, as those in Olmsted Park have already been snatched.
The 48-year-old naturalist searches old-growth oaks as he hunts for the curly-edged brown and white mushroom -- known in Japan as maitake, ''the dancing mushroom" -- where hens of the woods grow. ''Look for the habitat, not the mushroom," he says.
Around one oak, which practically hugs the speeding traffic on the Jamaicaway, he finds honey mushrooms, another type of fungi often found on plates in area restaurants.
After 25 years studying mushrooms, Neill says about 4,000 species grow in New England. He has seen 40 different mushroom species on one downed tree alone. Millman has documented 450 species in the Wachusett Meadow Wildlife Sanctuary and is surveying Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket to record their fungi population.
Neill finds recent scars on several giant oak boles, evidence foragers have scraped off mushrooms, and one hen of the woods just off a paved path in a spot popular with urinating dogs and Starbucks drinkers, who toss their empty cups in the shrubbery.
Then he finds a hen of the woods just beginning to bud, too young to pick, what Millman jokingly refers to as a ''chick of the woods."
''I've seen one of these go from a bud to a 10-pound mushroom in a week with some rain," Neill says. He'll be back, unless a local chef gets to it first.
Harvard Square's Craigie Street Bistrot, Central Square's Central Kitchen, and Newbury Street's Sonsie are among the many restaurants serving hen of the woods and other locally foraged mushrooms through the fall.
Tony Maws, chef and owner of Craigie Street, pan roasts the hens, honey mushrooms, and matsutakes (the American porcini) with garlic and thyme.
He also pairs wild mushrooms with eggs or a spiced pumpkin puree.
Will Quackenbush at Central Kitchen tosses hens of the woods with ricotta dumplings, fresh peas, and shallots.
Neill grows animated when he spots a palm-sized Ganoderma polypore, a shelflike fungi that grows on trees. He calls it the artist's fungus, flips it over to expose its porous white underside, and etches into it with his knife.
''I've seen some beautiful artwork made with these," he says. ''Dry them, and it lasts for years."
A few days before, Millman also finds an artistic mushroom, the inky cap. The tight cluster of brown mushrooms grows from an oak stump and has dark caps that decompose into an inky mess that looks like finger paint.
The inky cap is also known as tippler's bane, Millman says, because it blocks the enzyme that allows humans to metabolize alcohol. ''Eat one of these after a night on the town," he says, ''and you'll never want to drink again. You won't die, but you will get alcohol poisoning."
The crowning discovery on the walk is neither an edible nor an artist's mushroom. It's the lovely, hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria, a cousin to the deadly destroying angel and the same mushroom atop which the caterpillar in ''Alice in Wonderland" smokes his hookah.
Millman spies it from the path, rising from the bed of needles beneath a stand of white pines.
It's 8 inches tall, bright yellow, with an orange center. Its wide cap caves into a funnel on one side, sluicing off the rain. Smaller buds emerge from the needles, some pale, some an even more intense yellow with white spots.
He explains that the mushroom isn't deadly like its cousins, though it can give eaters a bellyache. Depending on its levels of muscimol, a neurotoxin, he says, it induces ''an incredible euphoria, . . . followed by incredible sleepiness."
Millman regales the group with the mushroom's possible connection with Santa Claus. In its Siberian and West Coast versions, the Amanita muscaria is red with white splotches, the colors of Christmas.
He explains that Siberian shamans valued them for healing powers and delivered the mushroom to the yurts of the ill at night, entering and leaving through their chimneys. The mushrooms, he adds, are a favorite among reindeer, which get high off them.
''That is, they fly," he says, raising his eyebrows.
At the end of the walk, Millman lights one of the show-and-tell mushrooms he brought along, a tinder spore, another shelflike fungus locally found on birches that for centuries has been used as a fire starter.
A small one, he says, will smolder for two to three hours, helping foragers keep warm in November, the end of the season when mushrooms sprout in such abundance.
''You know that Tyrolean ice man they found?" he asks the group. ''Well they found him with two polypores, one of them was this species."
On the short trek to the parking lot, he cups his hand around it, keeping warm by stoking an ancient tool as cars zoom past.
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