This year we have picked field mushrooms on Exmoor for the first time since moving here 12 years ago! In previous years we have spent the shortening days of August creeping below ancient beech hedges searching for the golden treasure of chanterelles. This delicate little fungi has always been a reliable yet priceless crop at the end of summer, growing on the steep mossy banks and looking to the untrained eye like a poisonous toadstool. You do have to be careful not to pick the masquerading 'false chanterelle', the slightly darker evil cousin whose gills stop short of the stem and who lack the distinctive apricot scent of the true edible variety. At over £30 per kg chanterelles, or girolles as they are known in France, are no poor man's mushroom but are worth their weight in their own beautiful gold! We have them mostly for breakfast with scrambled eggs, sometimes in risotto along with other foraged fungi dried and stored for the purpose. Once we cooked them as soon as we'd prised them from a remote hedgerow. We found the rusty shell of a WW2 bomb high on the moor, lit a small fire in it and fried the chanterelles on the tin foil our sandwiches were wrapped in. Those sandwiches with hot velvety chanterelles tucked inside and melting the cheese were about the best I've ever eaten!
But this year, after the long, hot, dry weeks of summer there are virtually no chanterelles to be had. We've visited all of our regular spots and only found a few specimens in a particularly damp and dank deep combe where a boggy stream gurgles and the sun rarely penetrates. I'm guessing there weren't any in 1976 either. Instead we have been blessed with field mushrooms now the rain has come. I can't say it's been a glut exactly but the yellowing grass is turning green again and is revealing the fruits of Agaricus campestris, the humble field mushroom. Oddly these most familiar of fungi can be amongst the most difficult to confidently identify in the wild, being easily confused with several other (inedible) white mushrooms including the poisonous Yellow Stainer. Look for pinkish gills turning brown as the fruit ages and opens, the scent of earthiness.
This August, filling pockets and bags, I have been carried right back to my childhood in Staffordshire when I would go out picking mushrooms with my Dad. Sometimes with Mum too but mostly I remember it just being me and him. That bumper crop of 1976 doesn't stick in mind, maybe because I was only six years old at the time but probably because we did it every year and in my memory it was always a bumper crop! We had a favourite field, on the edge of Hanchurch forest (our favourite forest); a huge field of several acres with two great mounds in the middle. There were usually cows who could be frisky and frightening and could take you by surprise by appearing from behind one of these mounds but their presence just added to the adventure because I had absolute faith that my Dad would keep me safe. That's more than could be said for my Grandma who was once left in the car with my Mum in a lay-by near this field while me and Dad strode off in a thunderstorm in search of the summer bounty we knew would've appeared thanks to the rain. Apparently she berated Mum for letting Dad take 'that poor child' out in pouring rain, thunder and lightning into a field of cows as it was going dark. I couldn't have been happier!
So every time I reach my fingers into the wet grass to feel for the bottom of the stalk and carefully break it I am momentarily back in that most magical of fields. The surprising warmth around each mushroom, the smell of the gills, the hunt for the perfect specimen and the thought of the feast to come are all feelings that have lived in me forever, lying dormant through the year until the time is right like the mycelium beneath the ground waiting for the conditions to be perfect before sending forth its fruit.
And then to the eating....the inky blackness of wild mushrooms frying in the pan bears no resemblance to the cooking of shop bought mushrooms! The smell of breakfast cooking on recent days took me back to childhood breakfasts as did the toast made soggy by all that black juicy deliciousness. I do remember getting ill once too when Dad and me got a little over-confident adding puffballs to our mushroom collecting - we must have picked a slightly old one by mistake I guess but we lived to tell the tale! Roasted mushrooms for supper the other night with a garlic and cheese topping, these meadow dwelling treasures hold limitless possibilities, I'm hoping to pick enough for soup and stroganoff, maybe pate and pasties....but that may be wishful thinking.
A few weeks ago we found a wonderful supply of oyster mushrooms growing on a fallen beech tree about one minute's walk from our house. I'd heard this tree fall two summers ago, creaking and cracking as it fell bringing down branches of other trees around it, always a sad sound but now providing these exotic sounding mushrooms for us! And still to come hopefully are the Meadow Wax Caps, a meaty orange brown mushroom which again may appear unappetising to many people but is actually very tasty. These have always been our staple autumn fungus along with ceps which we usually dry for use in chinese meals and risottos so it will be interesting to see if they like the long, dry summer conditions. Part of the joy of foraging is the absence of certainty, the element of chance, the thrill of finding treasure in the wild.
As my Dad got older his taste for wild food dwindled but he kept the River Cottage book of edible fungi close to his wheelchair at all times. I was going to give this book to him for Christmas but for some reason decided to give it to him many months early and I was thrilled that he dipped into it with enthusiasm often. He died on December 4th that year. He will always be with me when we are scouring the fields, dodging the cow pats in search of a free breakfast.
