Lost and Found in the Woods
Funghi Porcini
October in Italy is usually a time of fungomania, the annual attack of intense mushroom madness that afflicts Tuscans, Umbrians, and others who inhabit the peninsula’s mountainous central spine. In ordinary times, autumn rains have begun to soak the earth, still warm from summer’s heat, producing ideal conditions for precious funghi porcini (various species of boletus, including the prized Boletus edulis) and for delicate ovoli (Amanita caesarea). Often these mushrooms seem to spring up overnight. (Meaning that yesterday, when you looked under the chestnut tree, there was nothing; this morning, five fat porcini have appeared, little miracles of growth. In ordinary times, that is.)
After the first fall rain, it takes ten warm days for the spores to produce mushrooms. “In dieci giorni si fanno funghi!” Signora Antolini, my neighbor, used to sing after an autumn rainstorm, and she was seldom wrong.
But these are not ordinary times. A long, hot, dry summer — longer, hotter, and drier, by all accounts, than any in recent years — continued through September and into October. As a result the wild mushrooms simply failed to show up. But you wouldn’t know that, here in southeastern Tuscany, if you went to our local market, which takes place on Thursday mornings near the train station in Camucia, down in the Valdichiana. Next to the porchetta stands with their whole roasted pigs fragrant with rosemary and garlic, and the Sicilian who’s always present with eggplants, peppers, and Costoluto tomatoes from the South, there’s a man no one recognizes who has arrived from nowhere and has stacked up crates and boxes of porcini for sale. “From Yugoslavia,” the locals say, although Yugoslavia hasn’t existed for nearly 15 years. Others whisper confidently, “Chernobyl,” as if that long ago nuclear meltdown continues to contaminate all of Eastern Europe.
Alas, if you want to eat porcini — and of course you want to eat porcini because it’s porcini time, after all — then you must make do with these mysterious offerings even though, everyone agrees, they lack the flavor of porcini nostrale — our porcini, which are indisputably better than anyone else’s.
Personally, I’m not entirely unhappy with the lack of local fungi. It has saved me from the weekend invasions of porcini hunters who grind their SUVs down my kilometer of dirt cart track as if it were an autostrada, park under my beautiful stand of umbrella pines, and march under my bedroom windows at the very crack of dawn, men, women, and children, all shouting as if it were noon in the piazza: “Aaooh, Giovanni, du stai? Aspettami, per l’amor di dio!” They ransack my woods, tear up my fungi, then clean out their cars to make room for their ill-gotten mushrooms, leaving a raft of papers, soda cans, plastic bags, and plastic bottles as a memorial to their visit.
So I’d almost rather have Chernobyl-tainted porcini from ex-Yugoslavia, although, it’s true, they really don’t have the flavor of the ones from our mountains.
Part of the allure of local mushrooms is that they’re there for the taking, free of cost, and if anything captivates the heart of a true Tuscan, it’s the idea of something for nothing, especially food. (Tuscans are the New Englanders of Italy, reserved, parsimonious, possibly even a little stingy.) I don’t mind if my fellow villagers rummage through my woods — as far as I’m concerned, it’s part of the hard-won medieval right of gleaning. There was a time when they also grazed their pigs in our woods and the beasts grew fat and tasty on a diet of acorns, chestnuts, roots, and baby vipers. Often there was a prosciutto or a spalla (shoulder ham) at the end of the year in recompense.
To my mind, the villagers, the neighbors, have a right to what they can get from the woods — and what they can get is almost always something that I and my family are incapable of seeing until it’s pointed out to us. My gripe is with the SUVs with license plates from Genoa and Rome — Genoa, for heaven’s sake, a full day’s drive from here. What right do they possibly have to glean our forest?
Signora Antolini died last year after a long, hard, but ultimately satisfactory life, during the last decades of which I managed to extract small bits of her wisdom, one of which had to do with porcini. She was an expert at knowing where to look for them. She once found a large, handsome, totally insect-free Boletus edulis growing in the scuffed ground under the picnic table at the edge of our garden, where it had presumably been comfortably aggrandizing itself for many days while we consumed our lunches, happily commenting on how the air seemed full of the aroma of funghi these days, oblivious to the source.
That rare find was never repeated, although she was convinced (rightly so, according to mycologists) that once a treasure trove was uncovered, the seeker could go back year after year to almost certain fulfillment. She had a running war with Gino the Tuscan Bore, who lived up the road from us and was widely regarded as “our” contadino (farmer), although neither he nor we accepted that status. Gino was out in the woods well before dawn, no doubt to get ahead of those Genovesi in their SUVs. He would pass under Signora Antolini’s windows just after wake-up time with a full basket of beautiful mushrooms. It infuriated her to think he was out and about while she was still making coffee and slicing bread for her numerous family, but there was not much she could do about it.
When she went out, later in the day, she made sure to cover herself carefully against vipers. She cut holes in a big black plastic garbage bag so that it fit over her head, as if it afforded her the protection of a knight’s coat of armor. She assured me that it was both a necessary and an effective shield. She also wore a wide-brimmed straw hat that had belonged to her father-in-law. “Sometimes they drop out of the trees,” she said grimly.
Day after day she would patrol the woods until cold weather set in and the fungi retreated for the winter into their underground cells. Each day, when she returned with her finds, she would ponder what to do with them. The early ones were easy; they were consumed immediately, often battered and fried; sometimes, if they were large, grilled whole on the hearth fire, their caps spiked with stiff sprigs of mentuccia, the wild mint that grows in every field.
After the novelty had worn off and the golosità (gluttony) died down, it was time to preserve the mushrooms for winter. The usual way was to slice each vertically about half a centimeter thick and lay the slices out on screens that were set to dry in the sun and brought in at dusk or when rain threatened. In very rainy autumns, in every farmhouse you would find racks and racks of sliced funghi porcini in front of the hearth. The old people complained that there was no place to sit, but it didn’t matter: the drying of porcini took priority. Once they were thoroughly dry, the mushrooms were stored in old pillowcases and hung from beams in the attic of the farmhouse, to be used to flavor all sorts of ragùs, soups, and sauces throughout the winter.
Particularly fine specimens — fat, solid, with no insect damage — might be put sott’olio, sterilized by boiling them briefly in a vinegar solution, with perhaps some bay leaves or garlic, then packed in a jar and covered with oil. They were said to last a season, but I, schooled in Future Homemakers of America cautions about the dangers of botulism, never felt entirely secure. In my home, the mushrooms were consumed within a couple of weeks.
Signora Antolini’s wild mushroom ragù is a recipe I come back to over and over again, especially in wintertime when hearty dishes are welcome. She liked to serve it over polenta, although her husband hated polenta. He said it reminded him of the tempo di miseria, the period between the two world wars when he was a lad and in these mountains times were tough indeed. Pasta was unthinkable then, requiring as it did both eggs and fine white flour, and bread was in short supply too. Mountain people always had granoturco, as they called corn, but it was also what they fed the animals, so there was a sense of desperation when humans turned to animal food. Nonetheless, a steaming bowl of golden polenta is almost perfect with this sauce. ●
Here’s the recipe for Signora Antolini’s Wild Mushroom Ragù.
