It wasn’t quite what I expected – she took me hunting!
To my surprise I loved it. Getting face to face with nature is hugely liberating for us city folk. Adjusting our senses to track our target was both fascinating and hugely rewarding.
I was amazed by the inventiveness of natural camouflage, and loved the challenge of trying to pick out our quarry as it tried to blend with the background. I also learned that you have to let the little ones get away – they’ll be bigger and juicier when you come back. Who said hunters were bloodthirsty and barbaric?
Not that I deny the immense thrill of the chase. In fact it was probably even more of a buzz than the actual capture – though I must admit there was a primitive pride in seizing our food directly from nature, free from chemicals and processing, and taking it straight home to slice up and cook.
And we didn’t do it the easy way either - we were on foot not horseback, armed not with hunting rifles but knives (albeit razor sharp ones). Nor was there any ‘tally-ho’, beaters or master of the hunt, just a stealthy, methodical creep through the woods in pursuit of our target.
Best of all, our sport had all the thrills and spills of traditional hunting, but none of the bloodlust – no creature was killed, no pain inflicted for our pleasure: we were hunting for mushrooms.
It’s hard for English folk to understand why the Tuscans go so mad for their truffles or the Bavarians for their blackcaps. I was certainly puzzled – and concerned I was about to be poisoned. I was not reassured to learn that the word toadstool comes from the German Todesstuhl - death's chair!
But Katja knew what to look for - it’s all down to the colour (brown, not white, black, grey or red), texture underneath (spongey, not smooth), and lustre (dull, not shiny). Or you can also look for the presence of juices upon breaking, bruising reactions, odours, tastes, habitat, and season. Or maybe it just depends on whether you are feeling lucky...
Actually most of the world has no such hang-ups. Ancient Egyptians call mushrooms “the plant of immortality”, early Romans ‘the food of the gods’. Now, of course, we’re all puny buttons compared with the giant toadstool of China, who not only make use of all sorts of funghi in eastern medicine, but also eat nearly 3kg a year for each of their billion inhabitants!
Seemingly it’s mainly squeamish Victorians who fretted about poisonous toadstools, spreading wariness across the English-speaking world.
In fact there’s a whole science of ‘ethnomycology’, the attitudes of different races to mushrooms. Europe splits into us mycophobes in the north, traditionally afraid of mushrooms, and mycophages of the east (Germany, the Balkans and Russia) and south (Spain, Italy and southern France), who can’t get enough of them.
I am certainly thankful for the role of mushrooms in the ecosystem, recycling plants after they die and transforming them into rich soil – apparently if it wasn’t for fungi, the earth would be buried in debris and life on the planet would disappear.
And perhaps I should be happy about the magical elements too? I’ve no desire to experiment with hallucinogens, but I suspect my fellow Oxford resident Lewis Carroll knew what he was talking about when he had Alice eat pieces of mushroom, as advised by a hookah-smoking caterpillar, which made her grow and shrink.
But we were hunting for food – so are they any good to eat?
I was surprised to learn just how nutritious they are – despite being 90% water, mushrooms are high in B vitamins, phosphorus, magnesium, selenium, even copper, and are a good source of fibre. One portabella mushroom has more potassium than a banana!
Portabella in particular seem to have become popular as a low-calorie, fat-free substitute for meat. But for me it’s Quorn which is the real wonder-food – a fungal protein indistinguishable from chicken meat in texture, taste and nutritional content - but without the salmonella, antibiotics and general nastiness of the broilerhouse.
Samuel Johnson rightly mused that "it is strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them".
But if he had foraged with us in the forest, and only tasted our tortilla, I’m certain he would have made an exception for the noble sport of hunting for mushrooms!
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