Mushrooms

By Volodymyr Kish

Thanksgiving Day Weekend is one of my favourite events of the annual calendar, not only for its traditional holiday significance, but also because it is the peak of the mushroom picking season.  If you are a Ukrainian of certain age and generation, you will know what I mean.

I have wonderful memories of when I was a young kid in Northern Quebec, traipsing through wooden areas every September and October in search of pidpenky or wild mushrooms.  My parents would make it into an all-day picnic event.  We would set out early in the morning along little known mining or lumberjack back roads.  Every Ukrainian in the area worth his salt would have his favourite spot whose location they guarded jealously. We would spend the day tromping through the woods and hills with large baskets seeking the elusive fungi.  With experience, we learned to look for the rotting old tree stumps or fallen decaying logs that were the preferred habitat of the pidpenky. 

At noon we would break for a sumptuous picnic lunch featuring some homemade bread, kovbasa, an assortment of pickled vegetables and an offering of my mother’s baked goods.  The adults, of course, would also partake of some morale boosting spirits while we made do with fruit juices, or on special occasions, with ginger ale.  Invariably, we would return with several bushels of pidpenky, which my mother would spend the next several days in cleaning, cooking and preserving in those ubiquitous Mason jars.

For my parents, it was an annual ritual that harkened back to when they lived in Ukraine and would go searching for hryby, the variety of mushrooms native to most of Europe.  Although, my extensive personal research tells me that hryby (known scientifically as boletus edulis) are also native to North America, I remain sceptical, because if there were any here, then I am certain my parents would have rooted them out sooner or later, and they never did.  Supposedly, they can be found in California and Mexico, which unfortunately is a little far to go mushroom picking.

Hryby, of course, are one of the most well-known and prized staples of Ukrainian cuisine. They proliferate in the woods and forests of Ukraine and can reach a phenomenal size – I have personally seen individual specimens with caps over a foot in diameter and weighing up to two or three kilograms.  Their nutty, woodsy taste is as distinctive as it is addictive. 

Hryby proliferate throughout most of Europe and have been savoured since Roman times.  In Italy, they are known as porcini, in France as cèpe, in German they are called steinpilz, and in Spain rodellon.  Whatever the name, they are low in fat and high in fibre, proteins, vitamins and minerals, particularly potassium and selenium.  They also have significant antioxidant and antiviral properties. 

Alas, we have to make do with our own domestic varieties of wild Canadian mushrooms, and fortunately, there are plenty of those to tempt the palate.  Up at the cottage where we mount our annual Thanksgiving fungus hunting expeditions, the mushroom of choice is armillaria melea, better known as the honey mushroom.  They are light to dark brown in colour and tend to grow in large clumps.  We fry them up in butter with onions and garlic and then freeze them in ziploc freezer bags.  They make a wonderful mushroom gravy or can be added to various soups or sauces.

The other mushroom that we seek on a regular basis come in late September and early October is an almost cylindrical, white mushroom called the Shaggy Mane, known scientifically as the coprinus comatus. My wife and I have discovered a number of places along various park and wood trails in and around Oshawa where these mushrooms can be found and they have become part of our fall ritual.  They are particularly delicate and must be prepared within a few hours of picking, otherwise they quickly start turning black and become inedible within 6 to 8 hours of being harvested. 

This year was not a banner year for finding mushrooms at the cottage, though we did manage to find enough to grace the table for our Thanksgiving Day Dinner.  Next year, I am sure it will be better, and we will be out there once again tromping through the woods just as our parents did in their time.  I think there must be a mushroom picking gene in every Ukrainian’s chromosomes.