Mmmmmmmushrooms!

by Gerald Michael Rolfe

"Silver and gold and a fine cloak -- these are easy to send with a messenger. To trust him with mushrooms -- that is difficult!" --Martial

I adore mushrooms! If there is anything more voluptuously decadent in the vegetable world, I have yet to feel its flesh yielding to my teeth. And if there is anything more triumphantly vigorous, I bow my head in awe.

Mushrooms are sprung from nooks and crevices. They are the nubile fruits of the forest's fetid underbelly. Rising up silently in eerie, primordial darkness, mushrooms are as pregnant with mystery as they are delicious. I eye the mushroom respectfully. I understand that for every luscious mouthful of chantarelle or crimini lies a bed of amanitopsis vaginata, seductive and deadly. But like fugu, that is part of the allure. Life and death is separated by nothing more than a gatherer's err in judgement. (or in the case of Emperor Claudius, an angry wife!) Life's bounteous celebration is rendered more piquant by the unutterable proximity of its antithesis.

And oh are mushrooms delicious! Woe be to the cuisine devoid of mushrooms! Stroganoff without them would be nothing more than a mundane, gravied beef. Foie gras sans truffles would be the most banal of liver spreads. The flavor of mushrooms, from subtle to scintillating, can be an acquired taste. Children will often spit them out. Even dogs notorious for gobbling up table scraps will sometimes give a mushroom a second sniff. But like all the best things in life, the acquired taste is the most enduring. The earthy, nutlike flavor of a porcini conjures images of wood-sprites dancing upon my tongue. The pungent insouisance of the black truffle would compel me nonetheless were it common as crab grass. Morels make me ravenous for more morels! White caps beg me to slice them and smother a pizza! To taste a mushroom is to taste the earth that Apollo never sees. It is the very tang and smack of nature's teeming night.

Even moreso than the varied flavor, though, it is the mushroom's texture that I crave. The woodear's hyper-labial extravagance is a blessing to any sauce priveleged enough to nestle in its crannies. I rejoice in the chewy, almost resistant nature of its flesh. The melt-on-your-palate delicacy of oyster mushrooms is sinfully perfect in its innocence. The firm-fleshed portabella is like an unrelenting and generous lover. And the enoki, my personal favorite, pops pleasingly when chewed, its slender stems and small, round caps evoking a sensation of epicureal androgyny, as if eating them was an act carnivourous and herbivorous at once. Mushrooms, in all their many shapes and textures, feel good to the mouth. Whether stuffed, marinated, or sauteed, they can be counted upon to lend their satisfying fleshiness to the flavor of everything from tarragon balsamic vinegarette to Maryland blue crab. They are, more than the lowly soybean ever dreamed of being, the vegetable that would be meat.

And so I adore them. Prone to flights of absurd imagination, I see mushrooms under Diana's moonlit feet. I see the place of faeries and wood-nymphs and taste their energy in every splendid morsel of that which grows, unmolested by sunlight, in their midst. But for all my Romantic foolishness, I share the essential humid desire of all living things. The same green-fuse force which drives my passion for living also pushes mushrooms into being from the murky rot of the forest floor. It's probably not a coincidence, then, that this same force makes me eat them.

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