Feature article
|
 |
|
 |
Morel patches a guarded secret
By Fred Sauceman
 |
| Jerry Larkey (center) teaches his grandchildren, Walker and Katelyn Sauls, about morel mushrooms. |
I’ve been waiting five years to write this column. The call came on Wednesday, April 30, at 9:49 p.m. It was Patsy Larkey with news that morel mushrooms had been sighted. Not on some distant mountainside but right behind the house where she and Jerry have lived for 32 years. It’s the first time the couple had ever found them that close to their residence. With the increased rainfall we’ve had this spring, the conditions were right.
“My grandson and I came out to check my ginseng and see how it was coming along and, boom, there they were,” reports Jerry, a retired Virginia state policeman.
Jerry and Patsy live on the western edge of Washington County, Virginia, but that’s all I’ll disclose about the location. Folks in Appalachia are mighty secretive about morel patches and rightfully so. My friend Scott Barton, a New York City chef, reports they’re selling for about $42 a pound right now.
“Everybody’s got their own little favorite spot,” says Jerry. “And they’re not going to tell you where it’s at, for obvious reasons. Now I’ve been in different areas — I call them my honey holes — where I always find them, and you might go in there after, say, about the middle of April, the first part of May, and there won’t be any.
“And how these wound up here, behind my house, I don’t know. The spore that creates these mushrooms probably came from some I carried in here from other areas.”
I met Patsy Larkey back in 2003, at the McMurray Grocery in Bruno, Virginia, where Neal Hensley told me to start looking for morels when the leaves on the oak trees are about the size of a squirrel’s ear.
Poplar thickets and apple orchards are good places to hunt, and Jerry says some of the professionals advise searching for morels near elm trees.
I asked Jerry to describe the morel, in terms that an amateur mushroom hunter could understand, to avoid harvesting a toxic variety.
“A morel is very unique in shape and in texture,” he answers. “I think they look a little like a Christmas tree. They’re pointed, and they stand erect. They do not have a cap like some of the poisonous mushrooms you might encounter.
“They have little designs in them, kind of like a honeycomb shape. The color variations, particularly in this part of the country, are a tan or a beige color to a dark brown.”
Foragers accustomed to bringing their morels home in bread bags might want to change that practice, since those plastic sacks reduce the chance that mushrooms will return in the same area.
“A lot of people now use onion sacks,” Jerry says. “And if there’s any spore left, it’ll drain through the onion sack and back into the earth and then you’ll have more mushrooms.”
Mushroom hunters not only have to protect the secrecy of their patch, they also have to beat wildlife to the draw. Wild turkey and white-tailed deer appreciate the flavor of morels.
We take our treasures to the Larkeys’ kitchen, where Patsy prepares “dry-land fish.” First, though, she soaks the morels in saltwater for about an hour, which is a good idea, since all manner of detritus and microscopic bugs float to the surface.
“They do have a taste somewhat like fish, when they’re fried in cornmeal,” says Jerry.
Patsy dips the mushrooms in a buttermilk-egg wash, then into a mixture of cornmeal and flour, and fries them in butter and oil.
“There is no easy way to do this dipping,” she says. “You have to just dive right in. A lot of people try to dip differently, but I’ve tried different things, too, and I always end up going back to gooey fingers.”
Raised in Hiltons, Virginia, Patsy, who now drives a school bus, came to appreciate morels later in life.
“The first mushroom I ate, I was real hesitant about it. I said, ‘Are you sure, are you sure we can eat those things?’ I was raised on a farm, but this was not part of our food on the table.
“You can smell them, just like fish frying, because of the cornmeal mixture, I suppose. They’re so fragile cooking. They really are.”
We picked a good mess of morels that spring day. In Appalachia, the word “mess” can refer to a lot of things — green beans, lettuce, okra. It’s an indefinite measurement — enough to feed a family, some say. I ask Jerry, who grew up in Maces Spring, Virginia, what the word “mess” means to him.
“Well, if I was picking mushrooms and there wasn’t anybody at home but me and my wife, I’d make sure I had enough for both of us. If company was coming, we’d get a few more to have a mess. Enough to go around. So everybody’d have a fair share.”
The morel mushroom and dry-land fish are mountain delicacies that reward the instinctual human desire to hunt in the forest. And morels illustrate one of nature’s many ironies — that out of dampness and decay, among the dying root systems of trees, life and sustenance emerge in the spring.
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
|
|
|
|
|
