My neighbour wandered across the other day, lugging a sizeable cauldron half-full of cooked mushrooms lying invitingly in a lush dark-grey slightly peppery sauce.
He offered me some, and I took half a large bowlful – they were just too good not to have. He’d collected them from along the footpaths and around the park that sprawls beyond our homes. He takes his old dog for regular early-morning strolls, picking up aluminium cans discarded from car windows by brain-dead slobs, and, in the warm weeks of late autumn, harvesting the overnight crops of mushrooms that regularly leap into the world from the tepid, damp earth.
It was an ideal mushroom season through this latter part of April/early May 2014 – the drought broke after a rather anxious time for farmers, and at least here in the south Waikato / Waipa District the rains were gentle and softly drenching. I was amazed at how rapidly the paddocks across the region’s farms launched themselves into a high-speed pre-winter burst of growth. What several weeks ago were sear, parched, gnawed-out paddocks suddenly became lush, vivid green pasture. Even the weeds in my sadly neglected garden rejoiced at the prospect of some unmolested growing time before the first frosts arrived. I seriously contemplated unlimbering the back-pack weed spray outfit and laying about me with a degree of serious intent.
With the days of good rain and the continuing warm temperatures – 20 to 23deg C during the day throughout Easter and hardly dropping down to single figures overnight – perfect mushroom-growing conditions applied. Yet mushrooms are not seen out on the farms quite as often these days. Farmers are looking to get the best possible production from their land, and in consequence are applying goodly dustings of fertiliser in spring and autumn to work in with the equinoctial rains. Autumn fertiliser applications usually coincide with the mushroom season. Mushrooms don’t like fertiliser, so more and more of the less and less available field mushrooms are now harvested from urban parks, town footpath lawn strips and the carefully mown rural roadside farm grass frontages that are sunny and sheltered from the fertiliser spreader by dense hedgerows.
While the early bird may get the worm, it’s the early stroller such as my good neighbour who gets the mushrooms. Those who venture out later never know what they’ve missed.
Our neighbours, gentle, kindly people from whom we get much friendship, sometimes come to light with such tasty tidbits as the recent mushrooms, and we in return sometimes deliver helpings of an over-exuberant brewing of casserole or spare avocados. In the winter, I have a tendency to make a gallon of everything-in soup when really only a quart would do, so a portion happily passes over the boundary. It’s a pleasant, uncomplicated arrangement in which neither of us lives in the other’s pocket yet both know there is absolute dependency available should it be needed.
I don’t know how often that happens in urban settings – I think it may be somewhat uncommon, sadly – but in the country it is frequently the norm, and it is one of the means by which country folk are often able to do what they do in otherwise very lonely, isolated circumstances. Farm houses are commonly set 300, 400, 500 metres back from the road, and that’s a long way if you’re home alone; or if you’re a farmer working 200, 300, 500 hectares of land on your own, that’s a lot of quarter-acre sections between you and the next person.
So we reckon we’re pretty lucky – we have good neighbours all around, and we converse and wave and smile as and when the occasions occur.
And the delivery of a potluck bowl of home-brewed field mushrooms was also a good reminder of those early days when we were kids on the Otewa farm at the back of Otorohanga and the application of fertiliser wasn’t yet part of the regular seasonal operations. There were several areas on our 150-acre dairy farm where mushrooms, in season, were guaranteed. One was a far back paddock appropriately named “Mushroom Hollow” because it had a fold in the ground out towards the neighbour’s fence where, during autumn, the ground was often densely speckled white with mushrooms. We kids would gleefully pick a billy-full – and sometimes a hatful if we just happened to be passing – and we would only take the best. The ones that were pink underneath we always reckoned were the tastiest, though they never stayed pink when they were cooked.
Sometimes there would be mushrooms six inches (15cm) across; other times there were multiple buddings, with three or four or five little buttons all sprouting from the same central stem. But mostly it was the succulent little two-inch to three-inch (5 – 8cm) mushies that were the target. We’d pack them into the billy, then into our hats and finally on to the floor of the tractor trailer, if we found a really large patch.
There were other paddocks around the farm too where mushrooms grew prolifically – out across the “North Point” hillside; across the north-facing curve of the “Hawthorn Gully”, and out on the level fields that made up the “Football Paddock” and the “Waipa Flat”. Dad had names for all the paddocks, as he did for all his dairy cows, and the names helped simplify life for those working on the farm who needed to know exactly what area or what animal was being talked about.
Occasionally we would see, from our house up on the hill and a good 300 metres from the road, a car pull up on the side of the road adjacent to the Waipa Flat paddock way down the bottom of the farm. Little human figures would get out, clamber over the roadside boundary fence and scamper round the paddock, grabbing bags, buckets or handsful of mushrooms. It was, we felt, blatant theft, and had the roles been reversed and we had pulled up outside their townie home and carried out a raid on their front yard plum or lemon tree, the owners would have been outraged. At worst, my mother thought ‘Dratted townies’, at best ‘Well, we have plenty anyway’. But it would have been nice if they’d come and asked.
As always, Mum was delighted with the haul when we returned home from a mushrooming escapade, and she would set to with a will, usually humming away contentedly in her kitchen. Mostly she did mushrooms for breakfast. At this time of year there was always a huge pot of porridge brewing quietly on the back burner of the big Aga stove when we came in from two hours of morning milking. Invariably, we would be famished, and that first bowl of porridge, knee-deep in cream, a little milk and smothered in shovelsful of brown sugar, was wonderfully good. Frequently there was the need for a second helping.
Then, maybe, the mushrooms. They were always cooked in a flat, low-sided, heavy yellow enamelled iron dish. The mushrooms were peeled, the larger ones sliced in half, the smaller cooked whole. Butter was melted in the dish and the mushrooms sauted. Then a little milk was added, and the brew thickened with flour and seasoned with salt and lots of pepper. The result was slightly chewy mushrooms wallowing luxuriously in a dense dark-grey gravy that was spicy and peppery and invariably demanding of seconds, please. The gravy itself was wonderful mopped up with thick slices of warm toast. I’ve never come across anyone who could cook mushrooms as superbly as my mother.
Just occasionally, those mushrooms were served with lambs’ fry and bacon, all the ingredients happily coinciding in the kitchen on that particular morning. The lambs’ fry was rolled in salted and peppered flour before being lightly fried, and the bacon was not quite crisp. We loved it that way, and such meals were worth working through an early morning King Country frost.
But inevitably, it was that first frost which wiped out the mushies – they need warm moist conditions to thrive, like we had in the latter part of this past April. Comes the chill of winter, and the mushrooms rapidly pack it in and dive underground until next season. And then it’s back to buying button mushrooms in the supermarket.
They look good and they taste OK, but really, they’re not in the hunt with those lovely real live freshly-picked field mushrooms.
Kingsley is a columnist with the Waikato Times in Hamilton. His Outdoor columns appear fortnightly, and he has recently published a selected 25 columns in illustrated book form. A second book is due in June. Kingsley can be contacted at kingsley(at)accuwrite.co.nz