We Are the Champi(gn)ons

It's mushroom season, and we caught the fever.

October 27, 2024

Last week a new text group was formed on WhatsApp: “Mercredi, c’est champi!” it rang out. It was Jean-Yves’s doing, proposing a mushroom hunting excursion to the “Neighbors” text thread on Wednesday, the one day that week the weather gods smiled. “Alexandra, you’ll have to do yoga later,” he wrote. “Sorry!”

I know the path into the forest from his place. You enter it via a drainpipe trench with high sides, with a dizzying upward incline that lasts for a good 250 meters. (Sorry, after 18 years in France, I have stopped thinking in miles.) Exercise would not be a problem.

Call me a white American, but I relished my opportunity to exert dominion. Le Perche is prime foraging territory, and foraging is the one time that delicate foodie urbanites get a chance to play top man in nature. (I am one of them by formation if not present circumstance.) Mostly that primacy of place goes to hunters, especially in fall, when their season opens and their manly urge to drunken bloodbonding finds its way back to the light.

I kid the hunters. They perform a service culling the boar and deer that fill the woods out here. Some of them also juice the forests with spray-on pheromones to induce a second fertility cycle, thereby worsening the problem they supposedly exist to remedy. (To those cheaters I say fuck you.) My real beef with them is how much they remind me of the college quad dickheads who colonize public space with frisbee or soccer, territorially manspreading via fast-moving projectiles that put the other congregants, with just as much right to be there, on edge. Hunters are basically that but with guns that kill humans by accident all the time in this country, which has the most liberal hunting laws in Europe. So, when the season is on—and you know it both for the occasional sign at forest entry, and the sound of gunshots echoing in the valley—you stay far away because those fuckers are not nice and do not share.

It feels personal to me, which tells me that the shift from recent arrival to invested resident is complete. It’s not just that I want the freedom to roam in the gorgeous countryside where I live. I am becoming properly territorial. I guess in your 50s you want everyone off your lawn, even if it’s not technically yours to begin with.

Foraging out here has two main periods: spring and fall. In the former, we come for the ramps, which cover the hills out by Tom and Callahan’s place, and a small marsh by the southern entry to Saint-Maxine, near Simon and Michel. Within a few meals and jars of pesto, you run out of ways to eat wild garlic leaves, but you can’t help yourself but fill bags and bags because back where you came from, people who Instagram creative bistros speak about them in rhapsodies. It’s the satisfaction of acquisition as much as the taste itself.

Ramps

Then there’s the birch sap. Samira and Claude, my first hosts when I first moved to Le Perche, also tap the trees in spring. They fill .75 liter lemonade bottles and chug one of them to the bottom every day, swearing the stuff has magical immune-enhancing properties. Maybe I’m projecting, but I suspect they too simply like the idea of nourishing themselves from what grows wild. They gave me a bottle when I stayed with them, and it was watery and vaguely sweet and starchy. Pleasant enough in taste, but that didn’t account for the thrill.

In autumn, we come for the mushrooms. Ceps are the top prize, and on previous excursions with Jean-Yves, we’ve found bagsful. Meaty, solid, and not too footy-tasting, they caramelize well and hold up to almost any other abuse. Violet woodcaps are also common, though more experienced mushroom hunters than I turn up their noses. “There’s no gustative interest,” Eric, one of the party last week, explained.

Eric is a chef who heads one of Alain Ducasse’s fine dining restaurants—maintaining our policy of anonymity, I won’t say which one, except I’ll note that it’s a jewel in the Parisian chef-entrepreneur’s extensive crown. Eric, his wife and two kids have a weekend place next to Cassandre’s, and but for the occasional exceptional quiche brought to neighborly potlucks, he keeps a low profile. He never flexes or mansplains anything on the table, and he’s fast to compliment your dishes, which I think is sporting.

Foraging is fun but it doesn’t work in too big of a group. Even introverts like yours truly are social beings, and we can’t resist the urge to cluster and chatter. This thins out the gains any one of us could make individually, so soon we split up into pods. I was tempted to go with Gérard’s group hoping to glean expertise.

Gérard is a pharmacist about to close up his business in Paris, a very fit elder-gay with twinkling blue eyes and generations of roots in the country out here, including a stud farm on a big piece of property that is part of his extended family’s holding. (Land out here isn’t worth tons—his pharmacist gig is quite a bit more lucrative.) As part of their trade, pharmacists like Gérard are trained to identify toxic mushrooms from non-toxic ones. A tip for anyone foraging in France: take your haul to any pharmacy for validation and triage. Your life may depend on it.

As we started meandering off piste looking around decomposed trees and near clusters of almost-hibernating ferns, Gérard exhibited sings of preciousness. “That one’s no good,” he’d sniff. And I’d say, “No good because poisonous?” And he’d say, “No, just not that good.” And he didn’t say much more. When I am in research mode, a default whenever I’m in a relatively unfamiliar situation, I ask a lot of questions. I suspected I was annoying him, so I drifted over to Eric, and we formed a small team of four, including another neighbor’s twelve-year-old son and his grandmother.

On our way back there was also some chestnut gathering. The things that look like acid-green sea urchins are the chestnut’s very prickly exo-pods.

It wasn’t more than about fifty meters of bloodhounding when I saw some baby chanterelles poking up from a mulchy carpet of red and yellow birch leaves. They were like ochre-colored thumbtacks with tiny, bagelly holes in the center. I knew them from going out to this same spot last year with Jean-Yves and one of the jollier drunks in the village. The patch we stumbled onto back then had expanded by a factor of ten by now. Eric, who also took a mushroom class as part of some kind of fancy chef learning extension or other, validated the variety—yellowfoots—were indeed what we thought they were. “They cluster in veins,” he explained. Once we found a patch, we just followed our eyes and aching backs to another. And another and another.

Somewhere in my genetic heritage as the offspring of Mormon settlers of the American West there lies buried memories of the gold rush that came alive that day. I don’t know what Eric’s connection is to the hunting and gathering past of his French ancestors, but he lit up as well. We spent the next two hours on our hands and knees, gently pulling cap and stem up from the mossy ground. The kid and his grandmother more than held their own, filling up a heavy basket so fast that grandma started passing her findings onto me. By the end of our time, I had a large shopping bag about a quarter full of them. Two nights later, Eric would bring over another quite legendary quiche with chanterelles and spinach. I did not ask for the recipe but if anyone is desperate, I’ll ask him and post it in the comments.

We didn’t take even a fraction of what we found. There are rules in this part of France: nobody can harvest more than five liters a day, and nobody can sell what they collect. We’re not allowed to go out on Tuesdays or Thursdays, and legally, as well as by force, the hunters had first right to use of the land. We also wanted to make sure we didn’t tap out the patch or bleed it dry. We saw ourselves as careful stewards, doing the exchange with nature right, even though I pulled way too many out by the roots as opposed to lopping them off at the stem.

Nature is generous enough to lie back and let us project our notions of who we are all over it. Show me your discourse on the forest and I’ll show you who you imagine yourself to be. In my case it appears to be benevolent dictator. Not actually any more enlightened than the men with guns, maybe just quieter.