Ethereal Meat
Tossing crushed garlic into hand-churned butter melting in cast-iron pans, I caramelize buckets of wild mushrooms brought by foragers in the woods. Next, I prepare wilted spinach with hen-of-the-woods, then bake the tomato and sulfur shelf with macaroni. I supervise the morel caps and mushroom stuffing, before moving on to a personal favorite: puffballs, pasta, and peppers.
Between tasks, I rummage through the kitchen trash. Staring down into food waste, I am horrified by the mushrooms discarded today.
Sheen-less white, not floury or silky, like greasy primroses, they’re pale, yellowish, and leathery with watery flesh. Crowded into their crushed gills, thin and narrow, the mushroom caps resemble the crumpled faces of girls. In the fungi’s girl-face patterns, long-lashed, delicate paranoid eyes stare at buzzing flies lighting on their lids and lashes.
The girls’ faces on the mushroom caps rot twisted, gazing up through the trash at me in pity. Impaled on spongy, glabrous stems, like haunted lollipops, the faces are weeping. Cut down, wasted, they long to grow in fairy rings, but a forager plucked them from the earth where they grew, and I had to toss them away because they didn’t belong on the menu.
One girl’s face, eyes open, flashes through my mind with maggots on her skin. I drop the trash can lid and slink away to the stoves.
The woman peeks into the kitchen’s back door leading to the alley, where I gaze into the open doors of her van, at the crates of fungi dripping with substrate.
“A true meat substitute?” the woman says. “Imagine ecological repair, reduced greenhouse emissions, less food-borne disease. No more mad cows. No more slaughterhouses!”
Stabbed
In the kitchen, we prepare a simple test dish of mushrooms sautéed in butter and finished with herbs. They taste tender, juicy, savory, like the freshest grass-fed beef, but when cut raw, they bleed red and gluey, like a stabbed living animal. Unnervingly raw.
After that evening, the customers rave over the “meat” that isn’t meat.
Despairing, I know there will be no more once it’s gone, but odd things happen in the kitchen, where we prep the fungus that bleeds, like a stuck animal. Increasingly, the mushrooms we butcher resemble human flesh to the chefs who cut and clean and cook them, finding what appears to be hairs growing out of the pores and freckles, moles, and pockmarks. A fungus that appears as a human nostril with hair growing out of it. Another fungal growth resembles a child’s ear beside a mushroom shaped like a man’s nose.
Buttered Brain
David Greenberg, known as King Stropharia, or King David, is the buyer assigned to me. Every week, King David brings an inventory of the newly fruited mushrooms available for me to order. The first items David brings are the hen-of-the-woods, the Dancing Mushroom, grown on sawdust. Then, red chanterelles, cinnabars, and the giant puffballs with the texture of tofu and the flavor of umami. The chefs prepare them like eggplant—washed in egg, breaded in crumbs, and lightly fried for an appetizer or entrée.
On Mondays, we anticipate a special delivery from the Mushroom Farm, usually some combination of Shiitake, Oyster, Lingzhi, Lion’s Mane, or Enokitake.
The lovely goblet-shaped chanterelles for sautéing. The darkly beautiful Black Trumpet fungi, the Trumpet of Death. Indigo Milkies, Fingerpaint Fungi, dry sautéed and added to scrambled eggs to make a green egg dish that charms Dr. Seuss fans. The vivid Beefsteak mushrooms served raw on mixed greens delight customers by bleeding like raw meat. The Ox Tongue, a vegan steak carpaccio.
Even with all this bounty, I also trade with mushroom hunters, avid foragers cagey about where and how they find their fungi. Mushroom hunters are canny, bringing me Chicken of the Woods or even Lion’s Mane that weighs dozens of pounds, or Shrimp of the Woods, the popular Powdered Donut Fungus my customers crave.
Many foragers survive on what they find or on what they trade, and I’m happy to serve foraged mushrooms, though most of the foragers want to eat in the back room with the staff.
“Tonight,” I say, “we’re serving a delicious old man hunted down near here. The Old Man of the Woods, also known as the Bearded Mushroom.”
Dawn says, “I won’t be having him. What else?”
“Naked Goblets, Blewits, dry sautéed in butter and garlic and finished with chopped parsley.”
“What about tomorrow?”
“Ears and feet with Mushroom Toast.”
“And?”
“Tree Ears with Velvet Feet. Trust me, they’ll love it. It’s romantic, nibbling the feet and ears, whispering secrets into them before eating them. Make some sort of joke about it. Advertise it to couples as an aphrodisiac. Next week, we’ll serve broth of Cucumber Mushroom with a choice of Devil’s Urn or Lion’s Mane sautéed in herb butter.”
“And Saturday?” Dawn says.
“Fried Chicken of the Woods. Everyone will love it, even kids. I’ll bread and fry it like fried chicken.” I’m especially pleased by this offering found by one of our most trusted foragers, as well as the most resourceful. He has spies all over the state. How he found a fifty-pound Chicken of the Woods so high in the tree, I’ll never know. It took three men and two ladders to reach it and take it down.
“Anything else?”
“Brain Fungus!”
“Why not Grilled Lobster Mushrooms instead?”
“Egg Noodle Mushroom, or Buttered Brain. And mini-pizzas with Finger Puppet Fungi topping. For dessert, iced mushroom coffee with Candy Cap cookies.”
False Parasols
The overly enthusiastic forager makes aggressive sales, often bringing us sickeners or killers mistaken for edible varieties. Once, in my absence, Dawn bought fairy-ring mushrooms he promised were edible. The false parasols were vomiters, and the restaurant served them one evening with guests forming long, urgent lines to the toilets. The same forager nearly killed several people when he sold us a misidentified Destroying Angel mixed in with edible mushrooms. If I hadn’t inspected the lot myself and caught the mistake, my chefs would have killed about a dozen of our best customers. Today, he tries to sell us Hedgehog Mushrooms, maggots combing through their teeth.
Braiding the Lion’s Mane
“Remember that guy you told to never come back?”
“Yep.”
“He’s here. Again. In back. Waiting to talk to you.”
I go back on my word because of sixty pounds of whole, fresh Lion’s Mane. It’s huge, a giant white beard.
“What I wanted,” I accidentally blurt out.
“Can I get five dinners on the house, with wine?” the forager asks.
“With wine? Are you serious?” I say.
“If we make it the house wine and reserve a day that’s not so busy?”
“We’re always busy, booked up. You know that, Angel.”
He smiles at the nickname. Ever since the incident with the Destroying Angel, we’ve called him Angel around here.
“Please. It’s for my girlfriend’s birthday, our anniversary. What do you say?”
Looking at the Lion’s Mane, so beautiful, I waver. If I can instruct the kitchen staff to meticulously clean and preserve it, we can offer a special Santa’s Beard just in time for the Christmas Holiday.
“Okay,” I say. “We have a deal.”
“I’ll throw in this Dryad’s Saddle, as an apology for what happened last time.”
“Thanks,” I say. We shake on it.
This isn’t the only colorful trade I make—or almost make—this same night. Tonight, things start to go wrong when Veronica, one of the new chefs, whispers to Dawn, who shakes her head. “A new forager is waiting out back,” says Dawn. “We told her to get lost and come back tomorrow before we open to customers, but she’s insistent.”
The kitchen is a madhouse of preparation as I follow Dawn out the backdoor, avoiding the chaos in the prep station.
“I have the police on speed dial,” Dawn whispers.
I approach a petite young woman holding a bundle in a large basket typical of foragers. I laugh at Dawn’s caution. She thinks the foragers are drug addicts or criminals, but that doesn’t bother me if the mushrooms are good.
“What do you have?” I ask the young woman as she removes the towel covering her rectangular basket. I step closer.
Dawn pushes me aside. “What the hell? You crazy bitch!”
I finally see what’s inside the basket: an infant staring out with sweet brown eyes.
“Stop screaming,” I say to Dawn. “You’ll scare her baby.”
I say to the woman, “Sorry about my friend. Kids make her anxious.”
“This is a mushroom,” the woman says. “I’ll sell it to you for fifty dollars. It will be tasty. Your customers will love how tender.” Reaching under the blanket, the woman pinches the infant, who howls.
