Mushroom picking is a fungi old business

I SAW, in the Guardian newspaper, that a German woman, settled in England, had been arrested for picking wild mushrooms.

These were not liberty caps, proscribed under the Misuse of Drugs act because they bring on hallucinations which UK law, for citizens’ sakes, won’t allow.

They were edible forest mushrooms, and the lady was charged with theft from the UK Forestry Commission.

The Wild Mushroom Pickers’ Code of Conduct, 1993, recommends that pickers ask permission of the landowner, and pick no more than 1.5kg at a time, for personal use. Picking and selling 150kg (nearly three hundredweight) a day to posh restaurants in London — as did the lady — is, I think, a little over the top.

Most are picked in the New Forest. I would agree with the Commission that taking such amounts endangers animals and insects which depend on fungi as part of their life cycle. As we know, all nature is interlinked and no species is an island. I would prefer to see woodland flora and fauna — in whichever forest — survive and go about its business, rather than put fancy fungi on fat diners’ plates.

However, I have a confession. I, too, picked mushrooms commercially in Britain, and sold up to 10lbs every weekend for five or six weekends in autumn and winter each year. I would drive to Wales to see some of my kids, and to pay for the gas, I’d pick saffron milk caps, ceps and whatever else was good in the local forests.

The woman in the Guardian says she first picked mushrooms in war-time Germany when her family had to live in the woods, and forage. Picking forest fungi has always been a tradition in continental Europe and one species, blewitts, were picked and marketed in Yorkshire for centuries.

The French, Italians, Germans and Poles know how to recognise, harvest and cook a dozen varieties we, and the British, would go nowhere near.

(Nevertheless, a few dozen enthusiasts manage to poison themselves annually).

When she came to live in England, she noticed the profusion of wild fungi that went unharvested, began a business and never looked back. She says, “You go to any restaurant in London which has any name, and they serve wild mushrooms. I was the one who started that, not Antonio Carluccio. I sold the first mushrooms, in London, before he ever knew they grew in England.”

I beg to differ, madam. You say you began in 1973. I, a self-taught Irishman, was already flogging fungi to a top-end London gourmet shop, Justin de Blank, in Elizabeth Street, Belgravia in 1971.

The extraordinary thing was the shop took my word for it that the mushrooms were safe to eat. Yes, the first time I approached the manager with a selection, he examined them closely and seemed to know what he was about. Thereafter, each September and October Monday morning, I would pull up outside the shop on my way to tutoring a granddaughter of Ari Onassis, the Greek shipping magnet, in nearby Eaton Square and unload three or four cardboard boxes containing up to a dozen varieties of exotic fungi from the back of my rusting Ford Cortina banger and present them to the staff who, without a glance, would put them on the racks. I would collect a pound sterling per pound, and continue on my merry way, some 10 quid the richer.

Diplomats, or the household staff of diplomats, would come and buy them, at exotic prices, for there were many foreign missions in that exclusive part of London. As far as I know, I never poisoned anyone, or if I did, they didn’t live to tell the tale. Certainly, the shop continued to patronise me for the two winters during which I plied my fungus-forager trade. It was a windfall supplement to the family income and like many of my compatriots in London at that time, I wasn’t backward in private enterprise.

I note that the woman harvests something she calls “brown chanterelle”.

I hope she doesn’t mean “false chanterelle”, an edible but indifferent species with thin flesh and insipid taste, bearing no comparison to the real chanterelle, a delicate, delicious and hard-to-find egg-yolk-yellow mushroom.

False chanterelle are common as fallen leaves in October, but I would never have considered selling them to my customers.

Neither would I have considered taking 150kg of mushrooms daily — even at £20 a kilo — from the woods, despite the fact that, for some reason, fungi are 10 or 20 times more plentiful in British woods than in Irish. The woman was warned, ignored the warning, went to jail for five hours, took a case against the Forestry Commission, won and was granted a unique licence. If only the poor mushrooms could speak!