the Walnut Diary

The morel is the only North American relative of the European truffle, and mushroom hunters and lovers of fine food alike greatly revere this early-season treat. I stumbled upon a wonderful patch of them this week.

A few came off their stems easily with a pinch (mustn’t hurt the root or it will kill the plant) and I rushed home with a hat-full, fidgeted my way through dinner, and then returned to the patch equipped to harvest. Wow! Were there ever a lot of them!

Of course we ate the first few dozen, but then we had to figure out how to dry the rest. Plenty of advice was available on the Internet, but my electric fish smoker was impossible to control, and Bet’s fancy new gas stove doesn’t have the recommended pilot light. Nevertheless, the lamp and convection fan turned out to do a very good job dehydrating morels. Mom’s oven stayed full for two days, as well. We had a lot of morels to dry.

The trouble on the second day of the hunt was the letdown after the first. The return trip with an empty basket raised the question: do I move on to fresh turf or keep looking here?

The longer I hesitate and pick around the corners of yesterday’s harvest, the harder it is to move on to the unfamiliar. Then in my mind every crunch underfoot becomes, not a rotting twig, but a precious morel crushed under the leaf cover. What to do but look? Once this starts, almost inevitably I will spend the remainder of the day crawling around in the mud, looking under fallen leaves and brush.

I remember once reading that the way you tell a mushroom hunter from a brush pile is that if you wait long enough, you’ll see the hunter move. It’s not the tidiest of hobbies, but the joy of picking a morel out of the visual confusion of the forest floor is a lot like that moment when, as a child, I first found the cartoon dog in that complex drawing, Where’s Waldo?

There was one area containing at least three dozen morels I literally couldn’t get to. The undergrowth was too thick. It would take a chainsaw to get in there, and that would probably destroy the patch, or at least announce its presence to other hunters. I did manage to reach in with a digital camera and shoot some great pictures, though.

The next day It took me an hour and many scratches to crawl in and out, but yesterday’s fugitives made it into my basket. I also found a few in the long grass around the patch, but who knows how many more there are just over the next hill?

For the rest of the week, nothing. The morel season had suddenly burst upon me. They were everywhere, so abundant and fresh that I wondered if we could handle the sheer quantity of the harvest. We picked, we split and dried, sautéed and froze in a magnificent and aromatic frenzy, and then all of the sudden they were gone, and it’s as if they never were.

Like a bewildered man searching through fragments of memory to try and understand where it all went, I have worn a path back to the place of this magical bounty, but like the unearned beauty of youth, it’s gone.