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An original article by madhoosier, aka H. Kevin Cloyd
There is a definition of a Hoosier that goes like this; a Hoosier is somebody dribbling a basketball around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway while looking for mushrooms. As the pleasant days of spring approach talk in Indiana turns to mushrooms, specifically morel mushrooms, with reports of finding the little grays now filtering in from central Indiana and some of the big yellows showing up in the southern third of the state. It is commonly accepted that Indiana has three species of morel mushrooms, the little grays, the big yellows and the horsetails, also called peckerheads due to their resemblance to...
It is also commonly accepted that mushrooms appear overnight completely grown; the phrase “popping up like mushrooms in the spring” is common vernacular.
Some of my earliest memories are of hunting mushrooms on the family farm in Tippecanoe County, the floor of the woods covered in maple and oak leaves, patches of may apples scattered through the woods. Trips usually started by going directly to last year’s patches to see if they had produced any mushrooms before the general scouring of the woods. Dead elm trees, usually spoken as two words, "deadelm trees" were always explored for something about the conditions under a recently deceased elm tree is favorable to morels. As a rule of thumb once the bark starts to fall off the dead elm tree it no longer produces many morels.
Traditionally the little grays are cut in half lengthwise, rinsed, allowed to soak in lightly salted cold water so any bugs are removed, the water is drained off, the mushroom is allowed to dry off then is rolled in flour and fried in butter, bacon grease or lard. In my family mushrooms were often accompanied by pounded round steak (also rolled in flour and fried) but a mess of crappies or T-bone steaks broiled over a bed of coals from corncobs were also favorites. The big yellows are prepared the same except they are cut into strips lengthwise. The big yellows followed the little grays by two or three weeks but very often were found in the same patches as the little grays.
In the spring of 1995 I was working on the yard of my newly built modest little home in Wabash County when I discovered a patch of the big yellows under a deadelm tree by the edge of my yard. Four hours later nearly a hundred big yellows graced my refrigerator and a couple of hours after that a mess of crappies were ready to be filleted. The Wabash County property didn’t have a reputation as a great mushroom producer but an outbreak of Dutch elm disease had killed off most of the elm trees the two previous years.
In 1996 as the pleasant spring weather approached hopes grew for another harvest of morels, in late April I spotted a few little grays where the big yellows had been found the year before. My niece was supposed to visit from the city the next day and as these mushrooms were just off the edge of the yard I thought I’d let her pick them, early the next day, after surveying the landscape to make sure nobody saw me I checked the mushrooms and they were still fine, so when the phone rang and my niece canceled the visit the mushrooms were spared the frying pan for another day. A shower that evening provided a nice drink for the mushrooms but once again my sister canceled the visit, after making sure nobody was looking I checked out the mushroom patch again. After this pattern of my niece or her mom canceling the visit repeated a couple of more times, my regular checkups on the morels disclosed that they had grown ever so slightly. As a week or so passed my little gray morels were now pretty good sized gray morels, in fact soon they were as large of a gray morel as I’d ever picked. As another week passed the pale gray was replaced with the warmest shad of yellow and my little gray mushrooms were now five times the size they were as little grays.
As the pleasant days of spring turn into the truly hot days of summer the growth period of morels ends, and anytime during the growing season a spell of dry weather will cause the morels quality to diminish rapidly, and while I’m sure that there are some individual critters that have discovered the tasty morel most learn that eating random mushrooms is not wise, so really the only critter to worry eating your morels roams the forest upright on two legs.
Morels are now harvested for market, and wholesale above $15.00 a pound with retail prices in excess of $25.00 a pound additionally there are reports of morels selling for over $65.00 dollars a pound in foreign markets. Professional mushroom hunters think nothing of poaching and know which woods are owned by absentee owners. There is now talk of gang violence including murder in the harvest of morels where finding a big patch of mushrooms can return several hundred dollars on a good afternoon. There are also ethnic tensions in the harvest of morel mushrooms as they have become a favorite in many Asian communities that aren’t often in contact with the rural landowners on whose lands the mushrooms are found
On one of the very few Martha Stewart shows I’ve ever seen Martha did a show on morel mushrooms where she said that the stem of the morel is tough and should be trimmed away. Of the several thousand morels I’ve encountered I’ve never found one with a tough stem but if you’re consuming store bought button mushrooms their fibrous stems can detract from the experience. In fancy restaurants dishes containing morels sell for top dollar and are among the most expensive on the menu, ounce for ounce fetching prices usually reserved for bloated duck liver or fish eggs. Photos of morels prepared in top restaurants rarely show the stems as large morels are split in half and stuffed with various blends of spinach, nuts and exotic cheeses. I suspect the chefs don’t toss out the stems like Martha did.
On a personal level mushroom hunting is one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve ever had, especially since hip replacement surgery in 2002 left me with a partially paralyzed leg below my left knee, causing my sense of balance to be so bad that I was unable to move through the dense woodlands mushrooms prefer. While the paralysis still remains my sense of balance has finally learned to compensate for the inactive muscles allowing me to once again navigate through the woods. The idea that one could be mugged of ones bag of mushrooms hasn’t caused me to pack my 16 ga. but the Tippecanoe County land the family owns is so heavily poached if I hunted there I’d be tempted to bring it along.
That our species could wrongly believe that morel mushrooms, unlike any other living organism magically appear, fully grown, overnight and that this idea would be so persuasive that it is a metaphor for things happening quickly tells us a lot about our need to believe in that which serves us in the short run, while also disclosing just how easy it is to ignore that which will affect us in the more distant future. That the state of America’s economy is so bad people turn to violence to collect mushrooms to sell is also a reality that’s overlooked by our corporate owned media. Finally, if the wealthy elite in America are dumb enough to believe that the stem of a morel is tough, without ever having eaten one, then I’d say their wealth is not so much a result of their superior talents as it’s a result of their superior ability to con the rest of us, as well as themselves.
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