According to our lovely heating engineer “Mushroom picking is a competitive sport in the Czech Republic”.
He is right you know! As you drive along the back roads at ridiculous times of the early morning you can already see flashes of clothing through the trees as the foraging starts.
For us Brits Abroad, mushroom picking is not so much competitive as an “Extreme” sport. Bear in mind that on the whole Brits do not forage (although Hugh F-W is helping with the recent surge of interest in this area). A neighbor once turned down fresh carrots from my garden because she preferred to see what she was getting all wrapped up at Tesco. OK so we might pop down a local lane to pick blackberries but how many people actually pick the wild plums and cherries that grow locally.... not many I can tell you.... in fact whilst eating some during dog walking, I am often asked by fellow walkers whether it is safe to eat the fruit from the trees!!
Anyway I diverge. “Extreme”, yes because we Brits on the whole have absolutely no idea what we are doing when it comes to mushrooms. It is a bit like Russian Roulette for us. Our parents didn’t teach us what to look for and I guess that as children a giant puffball was there to be kicked not eaten. Over the last few months my lovely Czech friends have taken time out with me for foraging/teaching trips to various good mushroom hunting spots. So far I have managed to pick some of the most deadly specimens and also some pretty good eaters.
I have a fairly simple system to decide whether I will eat something that I have picked myself. Firstly I try to identify it in one of several mushroom books that I now own. Usually I am left with a choice of two pictures, one of a very poisonous mushroom and one of a particularly delicious mushroom – both of which appear to look the same. Then, I present the mushroom and the pictures of specimens in the book to my builder (yes, the builder – most Czech people have a pretty good understanding of mushrooms). If he says yes, I then take it to my friend Hannah who gives me a definitive answer before I cook/eat it. If he says no, I abandon the mushroom and try to remember what it looked like.
So far, I have Chanterelles in the freezer and I have dried some Boletes ready for winter stews. Of the mushrooms that need be eaten fresh the Parasol is probably the most interesting find. You fry it whole and it tastes a bit like scrambled egg but has the texture of fish (sort of!) The best thing about them is that they are kind of easy to spot because of their size. We measured the last find up against the dog (I didn’t have a tape measure with me) and just look at the size of it!!
