© Juan Moyano/Alamy Stock PhotoRachel Cooke: ‘How on earth did a predilection I always thought of as rather odd suddenly become so hip?’
In her new book,
The Way Through the Woods, the Norwegian-Malaysian writer Long Litt Woon describes the various sensory pleasures that are involved in the gathering of mushrooms: the beguiling way they yield to the human hand; their different textures, whether velvety or hairy, rubbery or powdery; even the noises they make (some pop when snapped). Above all, there are the different ways that they smell. The prince mushroom comes with top notes of marzipan. The wood blewit brings to mind burnt rubber. The common stinkhorn emits the sweet aroma of rotting flesh.
Smell plays a vital role in a mushroom's popularity as food - though as Loon notes, this isn't always straightforward. Different cultures favour different smells. When the matsutake or pine mushroom was discovered by a Norwegian mycologist in 1905, it was given the name
Tricholoma nauseosa on the grounds that its odour was unpleasant (the American mycologist David Arora has since described it as being reminiscent of dirty socks). In Japan, however, where those who pick it wear white gloves and there are poems describing its virtues that date from 759 BC, it is considered to smell divine - which is why, in 1999, when it was discovered that
T. nauseosa and the Japanese pine mushroom are the same species, people there lobbied for the right to rename it
T. matsutake (the Japanese for pine mushroom).
Long's book, in which she recounts how mycology helped her to recover from the death of her husband, could hardly be better timed. In the UK, we're just coming, thanks to some well-timed rain, to the end of the best mushrooming season in years. Where the British were once distinctly nervous of foraging for fungi, now everyone's signing up for courses and merrily buying field guides. The other day I saw a newspaper headline that read: "THREE TO PICK NOW." Beside it was a picture of a parasol mushroom. It was as if it was sale time, and the fungus was a Burberry trench or a pair of shoes by Jimmy Choo.
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