A noddy's guide to mushrooming (Czech Republic)

If it’s still sitting there when you come along, ask yourself what’s wrong with it?  Why hasn’t it been picked already by the experts—the citizens of Hutĕ?  If they don’t want it, would you?  (Clue: the answer is no.)

If it looks wholesome, ask yourself why haven’t the worms already chewed it to bits?  Cut it open longitudinally to see if it’s hole-ridden.  (Clue: the answer is more likely to be yes.)

If it’s brightly coloured, especially if it looks like those beautiful striking red toadstools with white dots in fairy tales, stay clear.  (Clue:  not all that’s attractive is always palatable.)

If it has a slimy sticky top, is of a nondescript shade of dark brown and almost hidden from view in the forests around Hutĕ, it might be the edible type.  The sticky top has to be removed, which entails a lot of work.  (Clue:  there’s no such thing as an easy lunch.)

Hunting for mushrooms in the fairly open forest—with 100ft-tall fir trees—requires keen eyesight to spot the camouflaged ones and to differentiate between the real McCoy and the mimickers.

Hunting for mushrooms in the fir thickets—with branches growing horizontally outwards right down to mid-shin or knee height—requires scrambling around at ground level, sometimes on all fours, encountering animals’ droppings at close quarters.  If one finds crawling around on the forest floor undignified and decides to advance along in an upright position, one risks walking through spiders’ webs full in the face, having branches whip back at one’s face and in one’s eyes, hair clawed at, arms and face scratched, and legs pricked through the trousers by the pine needles.

If you’re still undeterred by all this, an hour of mushrooming might net you a basketful of the fungus, but you spend hours processing them—peeling and scraping.  The sticky-skin type will fight back by refusing to leave your fingers, so that you end up with your fingers full of bits of sticky skin which no amount of flicking will remove.  The drying variety will need to be sliced thinly and placed on a drying rack—pray for sunny dry weather continuously for a few days for this, or they’ll just go mouldy.

Then the cooking: cutting them into little pieces for soups, bigger pieces for stir-frying in garlic or to go into a stew, halving the smaller ones for pickling, battering big whole ones for schnitzelling.  

Finally, the long-awaited moment:  the enjoying of the fruits of your hard labour.  This will take about five minutes.  Max.  (For the pickling and drying varieties, you’ll have to wait a lot longer before they're ready, but the eating time is about the same: five minutes, max.)