A Gift from the Bosco: Finally Funghi

A fine load of porcini from Monte Amiata

For a while it really looked as though there would be no funghi at all this year. No mushrooms? Niente funghi? All over Italy cooks wrung their hands: Mushrooms, wild or cultivated (but preferably wild), fresh from the forest, preserved in oil, or dried for winter storage, are as much a staple in many traditional dishes as salt, pepper, and garlic. But the drought that dried up streams and reduced major rivers like the Po to a mere trickle—the worst drought in 70 years, said the press—also desiccated meadows and woodlands where the vast array of wild funghi flourish. The mycelium was still there, wide-spread underground, but dormant in the soil of the forest floor; the mushrooms like tiny seeds waited for the early autumn rains to baptize them, waited for the dry earth to grow soft and moist and cushion them into life.

Rain clouds, southern Tuscany

And then, in the last week of September, it began to rain, a steady flow, day and night, sometimes drenching, sometimes just gently misting, but it was exactly what was needed because in the next 48 hours the mushrooms were bursting forth--white puffballs, pale apricot-colored chanterelles, bright orange ovoli or amanitas, pink-tinted field mushrooms called prataioli and, king of them all, the royal boletes, called in Italian porcini or little pigs, with fat stems and stout caps colored all the earthy shades of terracotta from light biscuit to dark, almost black, siena brown.

The bosco (the forest or woodland) that embraces the small farms of my remote mountain valley is a dense, at times impenetrable concentration of rough, tough, spiny, wiry undergrowth that’s typical of the Mediterranean macchia, thickets of blackberries, nettles, heathers, ginestra or broom, wild plum and cherry bushes, intermingled with stands of scrub oak (quercia), evergreen oak (leccio) and noble oak (rovere), as well as groves of chestnuts, beech, and other splendid trees, their highest branches often tangled with mistletoe. It is prime territory, well-known as a source of the finest funghi, especially the prized porcini (Boletus edulis). Crisscrossing the bosco, connecting farm to farm and mountaintop to streambed, is a rambling network of tracks that have fallen into disuse in recent decades but most of which still exist on the catastral maps in the comunal offices in Cortona, as well as in the minds and memories of old-timers in the valley. Some of these pathways, on the evidence, go back at least to Roman times and possibly even earlier when the valley was a link between Etruscan settlements on either side of the mountain range. It is along these old trails that my friend and neighbor, Mita, used to prowl, early in the day when the first sunlight slanted through tree branches to touch the mist rising from the valley. At that time of day, the mountain air was pure and cool, smelling of sodden earth and mushrooms, and the damp leafy ground sank beneath the forager’s feet.

Mita, alas now long gone but still missed and still quoted whenever a problem arises, was a champion porcini hunter. She didn’t bother much with any other kind of mushroom but the king boletes were her prize. Sometimes, if she could catch a ride, she’d take a basket of freshly harvested porcini, dried leaves and earth still clinging to them, to Cortona to sell in the market or bargain with local restaurants. But most of what she gleaned was cleaned, sliced, and dried in the sun to be stored in an old pillow case and added to whatever ragùs or sauces or soups were made throughout the winter months.

Try her technique sometime this winter when you make a vegetable minestrone: Soak some dried sliced porcini (the ones you harvested or the ones you bought) in warm water for 30 minutes or so, then chop them up and add to the soup. I think you’ll be surprised at the rich umami fragrance and flavor they lend to ordinary vegetables.

Porcini alla griglia, da Luciano (Antiche Sere), Bevagna

In mushroom season, a collective madness descends over Italy. With their love of good food, their deep attachment to the soil, and their innate sense of the seasonal rightness of its products, Italians need little urging to get out in the woods. Whole multi-generational families, from toddlers to grannies and great-grannies, go mushrooming together—and, alas, sometimes expire together too. Not a season goes by, it seems, without tabloid headlines from somewhere tolling the expiration of at least one entire family that mistook the deadliest amanitas (Amanita phalloides) for their delicious not-quite-look-alike cousins, called ovoli buoni, or good eggs (A. caesarea--Caesar’s mushroom). In the still and secret hour before dawn, I sometimes awake to the babble of strangers beneath the bedroom windows of our farmhouse. They gather under the chestnut trees, waiting for first light, their big sports utility vans crowding our driveway.

They are there to glean the bosco, an ancient tradition, going back before the Middle Ages. The idea that the forest is a common heritage, a common right, available to all, was contested for generations by the aristocracy, determined to reserve it for their own use to hunt noble game—stags and boar especially. The saltus or uncultivated land was seigneurial property. In medieval times, with the right to hunt restricted to the nobility, game, fresh meat, was the mark of the aristocratic table while peasants provisioned themselves through their own agriculture and husbandry. (It was a major reason why vegetables were disdained as “ignoble” food by courtly diners.) Peasants weren’t after game, of course, or at least not large game, since they lacked the means to go after it—horses, weaponry, beaters, and well-trained dogs. They were searching the bosco for humbler rewards—scrap wood, wild berries and greens, and, of course, mushrooms. And the hard-fought right to do that is, to a certain extent, preserved to this day. Hence those foragers who stake a claim on our woods whenever the funghi pop up.

Porcini for breakfast

I did not grow up eating mushrooms. My father, like most Mainers of his generation, called them toadstools and regarded them with deep suspicion. (He did grow to like a product called B in B--“broiled in butter”--mushrooms because, also like people of his generation, he trusted American industry to bring him safe products.) It was a Russian-American friend from college who introduced me to fresh mushrooms, an integral part of her recipe for veal Stroganoff, and from that moment I was hooked. Many years later, in the Gredos Mountains southwest of Madrid, a farm wife gave me a paper sack of fresh chanterelles. I thought I had never tasted anything so superbly elegant. But that was before I had my first experience of porcini and I cannot tell you now when that was or where, just that once I had been initiated, I became a fervent believer. I’ve been collecting recipes, mostly in Central Italy (Umbria, Tuscany, the Marche, up into Emilia-Romagna) ever since. The recipe below, for Zuppa di Funghi Porcini, is one of the simplest and one of the best.

Breakfast of champignons: Scrambled eggs with fresh porcini

One more note, however, about mushrooms: the magical chanterelles from Spain are many degrees more tasty, more delicate, more enticing, than any chanterelles I’ve ever found in Tuscany, where most foragers don’t even bother with them. In the same regard, the porcini I occasionally find in the woods of Maine just don’t hold a candle, flavor-wise, to the ones that come my way in Tuscany. It is, in the end, all about terroir—about the sun, the rain, the air that rises from mountain valleys, and above all the rich complexity of the earth embracing the mycelium that underlies us all. Keep that in mind, the next time you go looking for funghi!

Zuppa di Funghi Porcini (Wild Mushroom Soup)

This comes from a recipe in my book Flavors of Tuscany (Broadway Books). It makes six servings as a first course.

Finely chop together a medium onion (red or yellow), a carrot, and 2 stalks of celery, and gently sauté the vegetables in the bottom of a soup pot in 3 tablespoons of olive oil. When the vegetables are soft but not brown, add about a pound of porcini or other wild mushrooms, carefully cleaned and sliced or cut in small pieces. Turn the mushrooms in the fat, which they will absorb and then release again along with their juices.

Sprinkle with about a tablespoon of unbleached all-purpose flour, stirring to mix it in very well.

At this point add about 6 cups of light chicken broth that has been heated to a simmer. Stir to mix, then taste and add salt and plenty of ground black pepper. Cover the soup pot and cook at a very slow simmer for 30 minutes or so, until the broth is fully impregnated with the flavors of the mushrooms.

While the soup is simmering, toast six slices (one per serving) of country-style bread. Rub each toasted slice with a cut clove of garlic.

Put the garlic toast in the bottom of a soup tureen or add a slice to each soup plate. Pour the simmering soup over the bread and serve immediately, garnished with a sprinkle of chopped flat-leaf parsley.

Note: If you wish to make a more substantial soup, add some diced potatoes with the chicken stock; others might add rice but that’s not typical in Tuscany.

Some cooks like to add more flavoring—e.g., a pinch of fennel pollen, or a couple of bay leaves, or a dried red chili pepper. Just don’t add so much that you obscure the delicious taste of the porcini.

A little whiff of paradise: Camucia market.