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InvisibleveggieM

Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 17,504
Meanwhile: It's cèpe time in La Belle France
    #7438851 - 09/21/07 11:33 PM (16 years, 4 months ago)

Meanwhile: It's cèpe time in La Belle France
September 21, 2007 - Herald Tribune

MAISONS-LAFFITTE, France: Monsieur Maury, my pharmacist in Le Mesnil-le-Roi, is ready to put up his annual window display of mushrooms from the local woods.

As at nearly every rural drugstore in France, at least one employee traditionally helps the townspeople sort the toxic species from the comestibles.

Across the street is the forest of St. Germain. If you look at any of the guides to French mushroom hunting, they invariably 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 are beginning to be seen in my local stand of trees. You can't blame them, what with cèpes (Botulis edulis) going for €40 a kilo at the local marché.

Jean-Phillipe, my neighbor, has generously knocked on my door this morning, and we start wandering the musty leaf-strewn forest floors beneath chestnut and walnut trees. We harvest 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 have been hired to protect forests either owned or appropriated by local farmers. Newspapers reported noses broken, windscreens smashed and tires slashed. Fines of up to €300 and penalties of €1,500 have been levied on professional traffickers.

But here in the Yvellines, west of Paris, the forest of St. Germain is hospitably bucolic. Monsieur 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. The mushrooms were delicious cooked in butter and garlic, with a drizzle of olive oil to prevent the butter from burning. Two hours after ingesting a sumptuous portion, I was seeing geometric hallucinations. It passed, but for a while I was wondering what this meal would cost me in nausea, reduced kidney or liver functions, or paralysis.

So when Monsieur Maury came back, I quickly apprenticed myself to his wisdom. 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.

Jean-Phillipe teaches me to look in the areas where ferns grow - indicating copious ground moisture. If one breaks strings of cobwebs across their face, that's good. It means that no one has hunted this patch of ground this morning. Footprints of boars are good omens as well (here my experts diverge: Mr. Maury says the boars are only rooting for worms; Jean-Phillipe says they also eat mushrooms).

Great slimy red slugs are other pathfinders. Unfortunately, they usually get to the largest, most succulent specimens before we do.

Jean-Phillipe 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 the American Northwest, 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 cèpes, violet cortinaire, white pom-poms of vessie de loups, bright orange curtains of wood mushroom on tree stumps.

Just our luck that 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.


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