FOR 40 years I have picked forest mushrooms every autumn and winter, but I have never seen the abundance of perfect Boletus edulis, the king of mushrooms, that I encountered this year. I didn’t find them myself.
I was led to them by a remarkable man. Swearing me to secrecy, he took me on a tour of a sparsely populated region of south Munster revealing, at a number of sites, fat, firm boletus in a plenitude I have never previously witnessed.
At first, it was suggested that my wife and I should wear paper bags over our heads so that we wouldn’t see where he was taking us. However, such was the maze of by-roads, lanes and boreens we travelled that, although our eyes were wide open, we wouldn’t have a clue of how to find them again. How our friend, Horst, knew where to stop and climb that certain ditch to enter that certain small field – how he found that field in the first place – seemed little short of magic.
Boletus edulis, otherwise known as ceps, porcini or steinpilz, are the most favoured wild mushrooms of all. It isn’t the only boletus species that is edible and excellent: there were, among them that day, many dozens of birch boletus, also very good to eat. Ceps are so ‘mushroomy’ that they are the species used in gourmet tinned soups. I recall reading in a mushroom guide book that the author was once offered a man’s wife and mother-in-law in exchange for a basket of fine specimens harvested in the Tuscany woods. He didn’t say if he had taken up the offer.
Horst, a long-time Irish resident, had in 2008, taken us to woods carpeted in chanterelles, egg-yolk coloured mushrooms with caps like small cups, fluted beneath, a popular culinary species with a delicate flavour.
However, two average-size ceps will provide as much eating as a pint of chanterelles so we sought these too, but found none. Although chanterelle thrived, ceps were all but absent everywhere in 2008 and again in 2009. The last bumper year for boletus was 2006. And then, along came 2010, with a harvest of a magnitude rarely seen before.
Many of the caps of the mushrooms we found were larger and twice as fat as a bap bun, and the stalks almost as thick as one’s wrist. How beautiful they looked, with heads the colour of tan leather and the tubes beneath the colour of fresh cream. How solid and weighty they felt in the hand as we placed them in our baskets.!
Harvesting them, we cut the stems neatly, down low. A few were left at each site to deposit their spore for crops in years to come – and, in any case, inevitably, some specimens would be past their best, the tubes yellowing, the caps beginning to soften or whiten with mould, and so these remained too. Horst, visiting his secret sites every few days, had left specimens to grow larger so he could be sure to have a fine crop to show us when we came.
It would seem that this year’s hard winter, followed by the warm summer, generated the abundance of boletus species. Central Europe, where boletus have been harvested annually for centuries, has this weather pattern of warm summers and cold winters. The damper weather seems to favour the chanterelles.
We set about preserving the booty. Some, we ate fresh; small ones can even be eaten raw in salads. The rest were sliced into thin strips and dried. We rigged up lettuce wire racks suspended over radiators. They did the job. When dried, the volume of the huge caps reduce by 80%. Thanks to Horst and his Irish wife Rose, we have jars of pungent, delicious dried ceps to add to pastas and risottos for the next year.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, October 11, 2010
