Day 130
Certain foods are connected with memories and moods. I still marvel at how my serious German mother can morph into giddy happiness by eating chocolate, pizza, and mushrooms. Some of my mother’s favorite childhood memories in the 1920’s and 30’s are of gathering wild mushrooms in the woods close to her home in Brandenburg (near Berlin) and also in Bavaria.
Her parents were hardworking bakers. On weekends they often took a break from their bakery and store in Brandenburg, and took a boat down the Havel river to Plauer Sea, a lake surrounded by woods. After they ate the sweets from their bakery and both parents had dozed off, my grandma took her sister into woods to brush aside the pine needles to look for pfifferlinge (chanterelles). Here the soil was sandy and rocky and they had to brush aside the pine needles to find these hidden golden treasures. After the war when she lived with her grandma in Feuchtwangen (Bavaria) they would sweep away the fallen leaves to collect bigger and meatier mushrooms called steinpilze (porcini), which looked like white rocks. Toward the end of mushroom season they would dry them in the sun and eat them during the winter. After the war the unemployed people would pick mushrooms and sell them door to door. They were always a treat, no matter how they made it to the table. My experience has been, once something is labeled as a treat in your childhood, somehow it stays in that category permanently. The way my mom smiles when she has these mushrooms is evidence that they are one of those magical foods to her.
Our girls have also grown up mushrooming every Spring, at Paul’s family cottage in Northern Ontario. There the little elusive gems are morels. Most years this meant more of a relaxed nature walk, with a higher likelihood that we’d come home with a dancing unicorn than one measely morel. That never deterred the girls from reminding us every year that we had to go mushroom hunting. Two years of bounty has kept the notion alive, and we still look for them anually.
When visiting the marchés here in Paris, I was delighted to see the have mounds of fresh mushrooms, in various kinds. The golden squiggly girolles (pfifferlinge or chanterelles) and meaty cepes (steinpilze or porcini) are everywhere, with little clods of dirt still stuck to them to attest to their freshness. These are the mushrooms of my mom’s youth, so I feel some odd kind of connection to them. I can imagine how seeing these mountains of mushrooms from her youth would bring a huge smile on her face reaching up to her eyes, as she would nod happily. Even the thought of is makes me want to return to the market next week, until wild mushroom season ends.
