The countryside in October
Sarah Ryan is making the most of the mushroom season by gathering a variety of nature’s gifts from the woodland larder
“I knocked up a beefsteak-pudding for one, with two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and a couple of mushrooms thrown in. It’s a pudding to put a man in good humour with everything, except the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat”
Charles Dickens, Doctor Marigold
EVEN BEFORE THE daylight hours contract, the temperature has dropped. The nights have a distinct chill, which means that not only is a jacket necessary, but so is the woolly jumper underneath it. There is no better place to be than the woods at this time of year, and a basket is as essential as the warm layers.
Mushrooms are sprouting from the ground, and dead wood, chestnuts and acorns are falling from the branches. Berry season is all but over, but rose hips, damsons and sloes are still on the tree.
The mushroom species appear in waves. First come the fluted chanterelles: puddles of gold collected under pine trees, and the nefarious false chanterelles. They are not poisonous, but neither do they taste good. This year,
I have learned how to quickly and definitively tell them apart: the false ones are rounder at the rim, with a deep golden spot in the centre of the cap, fading out to paler edges; real chanterelles are a bit more ragged, or lacy, at the edges and more consistent in colour. After a few walks, I can tell them apart at a glance and only bend down if I want to pick them. Sadly, I have not needed to do that very much.
At the same time come the boletes: the famed and much desired cep, or penny bun, and its close relative, the bay bolete. Of course, these are harder to find than the lesser ones, such as slippery Jack, with its gooey cap, which seems to be springing up everywhere. The birch boletes, both yellow and brown, are excellent though, with a firm texture and striated stipe that echoes the pattern of the namesake tree they grow among.
The puffballs are out too: little, soft and stippled fungi, the shape of an upturned pear. Older ones develop a hole at the top, out of which the spores escape: if I find one in this state, I can barely resist giving it a little pinch. When I do, a plume of smoky spores puff out and drift away, but the younger ones go in the basket, to be added to a thick and creamy sauce later on.
Colourful caps
Next come the brittlegills, which I do not yet know well enough to pick. They are pretty though, with a white- or cream-hued stem and gills, and a coloured cap. Most of those I have found are flushed red or mauve, so easy to miss in the mixed warm colours of the fallen leaves. One
day, I round a corner to spy a squirrel sitting on its haunches beneath a tree, a russula cap in its paw, nibbling at the edges. These mushrooms seem to be very popular: squirrels, slugs, snails and beetles enjoy them, as well as humans.
Scattering of nuts
I am competing with the squirrels for chestnuts too. Nearby, there is an ancient woodland filled with giant sweet chestnut trees, and the ground around their roots is scattered with green, spiny cupules. Often, the casing is already split and peels apart easily into four quarters, the skin inside pale, smooth and delicate.
Nestled there are three chestnuts: a large, flattish one in the middle and two rounder ones on either side. Picking them becomes compelling, and I lose any awareness of time as I move around the leaf litter, picking up the prickly burrs, digging a nail between the quarters and unpeeling the casing to reveal the gleaming nuts inside. There is a rhythm to the picking and discarding that becomes mesmerising, and soon my pockets are full.
Turning over a handful of fallen leaves, I find acorns already sending out little pale green sprouts. Perhaps the seasons are not so distinct after all.
“I am, gay creature, With pardon of your deities, a mushroom On whom the dew of heaven drops now and then. The sun shines on me too, I thank his beams”
John Ford, The Broken Heart