MUSHROOMS AND TRUFFLES.
One of the most interesting chapters in Mr. Robinson's book is on Mushroom Culture in Caves Under Paris, those he visited being at Montrouge, just outside the fortifications. The beds are from sixty to eighty feet under the street and from this single cave the daily gathering averaged from four hundred to fifteen hundred pounds, the favorite size of the mushroom gathered being about that of a chestnut.
There are thousands of abandoned stone quarries in France, hundreds of which are used by mushroom growers, who earn many millions a year by thus catering intelligently and zealously to the palates of their countrymen—and of foreigners, too, for there is a large export trade—in mushrooms, fresh, canned, powdered, bottled in oil or butter, or preserved in other ways.
An odd detail about these caves is that, although they are well ventilated, the mushrooms refuse, after a while, to grow in them till after a general cleaning out and a rest of a year or two.
Although, both as a separate dish and as an ingredient of diverse sauces, soups, stews, and gravies, mushrooms play an important part in the cuisine of the French, they seem on the whole to risk the eating of fewer varieties than are consumed in some other countries. About a thousand different varieties are known to botanists, yet in Paris, as I was informed by a professor of the University of Lyons, only twenty-five kinds are commonly eaten, while in the markets of Lyons only half-a-dozen sorts may be offered for sale. One cannot but admire this prudent self-denial on the part of a race so addicted to the pleasures of the table.
In Germany there are frequent expositions of mushrooms and other fungi, for educational purposes. In England the Board of Agriculture issued in 1912 a little book entitled "Edible and Poisonous Fungi," with colored pictures of more than a dozen good mushrooms besides the one usually consumed (Agaricus Campestris). An English friend of mine likes to recall the days of his boyhood when his breakfast consisted of several platefuls of mushrooms which he gathered every morning fresh under the trees.
In American forests mushrooms grow in superabundance, but few are gathered for the table, though most of them are harmless. Speaking of the hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Harper's Ferry Dr. Wiley says he has seen "large areas of the forest almost covered with these growths in August and September, but the courage leading to their consumption was wanting."[10]
A picture in the Fliegende Blätter shows a little girl bringing a basket of mushrooms from the woods. Being asked by the pastor in passing if she is not afraid her family may be poisoned, she answers cheerfully, "Oh, no! We sell these."
The nutritive value of mushrooms is small. It is on account of their delicious and varied Flavors that they are gathered and cultivated; and Flavor, as has been pointed out so many times in the preceding pages, is so important to good digestion and consequent health that it is a great pity that in eating them one runs the risk of a painful death; at least in the case of wild mushrooms, some of which aggravate their offensiveness by trying to look as much as possible like certain harmless specimens.
While truffles, like mushrooms, grow all over Europe, as well as on other continents, in many varieties, it is the French, again, who have taught the world the most valuable lessons regarding their diverse uses for flavoring soups, sauces, meats, and gravies.
The French varieties happen to be the best of all, especially those grown in Périgord and in the Department Vaucluse, which was reafforested in 1858 with oaks, in the shade of which these fungi are particularly at home.
In Russia, formerly, bears were used to unearth them, but to-day pigs and trained dogs are relied on for locating the ripe specimens—a feat which man, with his inferior powers of smell, cannot imitate; the result being that when he tries to harvest them himself, great waste results through the uncovering of unripe specimens. Maybe, some day, our noses will be so well trained that truffle-hunters will be able to get along without pigs, dogs, bears—or flies, which, in warm weather, hover over the spots where the ripe fungi are hidden from the eye.
Truffles are expensive, and therefore often adulterated—with dirt, to increase their weight, with unripe tubercles that have little or no flavor, and in various other ways, including the making of artificial truffles from potatoes. An English writer says that the "false truffle" (Scleroderma vulgare) "is extremely common on the surface of the ground in woods, and is gathered by Italians and Frenchmen in Epping Forest for the inferior dining-rooms of London, where continental dishes are served. It is a worthless, offensive, and possibly dangerous fungus."