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."