When I ask my friends and students, in the late summer/early fall, what their plans are for the weekend, time and time again I got one of the most unfathomable answers: “I’m going to the forest to pick mushrooms.”
Now, as an American, first I’m thinking, “You’re going to ‘the forest’? No one goes to the forest, nowadays, except for hunters. Then I start to process the whole sentence, and I realize that the sentenced continued with, “… to pick mushrooms.”
“Excuse me? Picking what?” Why would they want to do that if you can just go to the store and buy mushrooms? That’s what we do. Why would anyone want to spend the nice weekend or mornings in the forest looking for mushrooms? And, moreover, how to you even know which mushrooms to pick? This was probably the most unbelievable thing for me. I grew up knowing two kinds of mushrooms (along with the rest of my American populace), poisonous and non-poisonous. I specifically remember my mom telling me not touch the mushrooms. They’re bad. So why and how are Czechs told something completely different. But the answer is simple. Czechs know their mushrooms. They know which are edible and which aren’t. They ask me, “How do you say in English,“, vaclavka, hřibek, bedla, or liška?” I simply answer, “mushroom”.
Is it a search party?
Driving around one day on some side streets between towns, I looked to my left and saw a plethora of people all walking around, cautiously observing the ground. Were they tracking some animal? Were they searching for clues of a missing child? Did they all lose their glasses and were trying to find them? None of the above.
They were mushroom hunting, but not just looking for a few mushrooms. People come back with baskets full of mushrooms of all shapes and sizes. Maybe you’ve heard your colleagues bragging at work as to how big or how many they found the previous weekend. My question is, what are they going to do with all these mushrooms. How on earth could someone eat such an amount of mushrooms before going bad? Is it healthy? Can you overdose? The answer is simple. You can do just about anything with mushrooms; just about everything Bubba mentions about shrimp, you can do with mushrooms. And if you cannot decide, dry them. Who would have thought? Freezing mushrooms! What an idea.
Mushroom hunting is simply something else. If you have the chance, try it. Although I expressed my shock, it is definitely more fun than you would think. Fresh air, quiet, good times with friends. What’s not to like. Ask a Czech! Why do you pick mushrooms? He’ll probably stare at you and simply answer, “Why not?”