cathmurphy

See more writing by cathmurphy

View cathmurphy's profile

Add a comment

Subscribe to cathmurphy's RSS feed

A traveller on our local roads this month will see many parked cars at the side of the road, usually where the forest grows thickest. By these cars stand middle aged couples, consulting maps and directing suspicious glances at those who drive past. Clad in stout boots, they are armed with baskets and if the traveller were to follow them, they would strike out in the wrong direction, lead you into a swamp and double back to their true destination, ignoring all cries for help.

It is the time of the mushroom gathering.

Mushrooms (“sopp” in Norwegian) are a traditional delicacy here in Norway, where hectare after hectare of woods invite shy fungi to venture above ground for their annual sporing. Like berry picking, mushroom gathering is an “allmannsrett” – a common right. Your mushrooms are everyone’s mushrooms: there’s no concept of private ownership when it comes to fungi, no tradition of escorting visitors off your land at the end of a shotgun as is popular with farmers in the UK. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the wild food gatherers can trample your hillside in search of goodies and, bar the placement of toadstools disguised as something edible, there ain’t nothing you can do to stop ‘em.

Which is just as well, because tempers always run a little high at the time of mushrooms. Unlike berries, which fruit everywhere (the little sluts), mushrooms are whimsical, fussy creatures, requiring just the right conditions (wind flow, moon phase, soil acidity, ley lines) to come together before they deign to stick a frond out of the ground. In the shops they cost a fortune, hence the growing spots of real prizes, like kantareller (chanterelles to you and me) are handed down from parent to child on pain of disinheritance should the secret be revealed.

Being a Brit, I know nothing about mushrooms. I do have a book - “Mushrooms for Beginners” - but it’s in Norwegian, so some of the finer points are lost on me. Like which ones are poisonous. If presented with a poisonous one (and some are deadly enough to kill you with just a funny look) and an edible variety and invited to choose one for supper, it would be pot luck: “That one’s nice and big and green. Oh? It kills you with just a funny look? Oops.” 

So when I was riding down the road with my daughter and caught a flash of gold between the roots of a birch tree, my reaction was muted. “Look – some mushrooms” I said.  My daughter looked as much as is possible when one is riding bareback and leading a feisty pony at the same time. “Those are kantareller,” she said, with the confidence of a child who has been to mushroom class at school.

Yes, they even teach mushrooms here. Once the horses were in the field, we sneaked back, keeping an eye out for spies. There they were – a harvest of gorgeous, orange fungi, sweet smelling and untouched by flies. We filled our riding hats, brushed dirt over our tracks and came back the next day with a bag. For safety’s sake, I checked my book – luckily kantareller are difficult to confuse with anything but a near relative, which is harmless but doesn’t taste as good.  I dried most and added the rest to a stew. It was delicious and we are all still alive.

The next day, my husband confided in our neighbour and best friend about our lucky find. There was a silence as Erling digested the news. “Where,” he asked casually, “did you find them?”