Mushroom Cloud

Mushroom forager Jason Ambacher

Bring a knife and a basket, the invitation said. They had me at “knife”. This is the basic prepper survival tool; when civilization collapses around us, which it is about to do at any minute, those of us who remembered to pack a good knife will thrive and flourish, while those who didn’t will just be very miserable.  

With our knives we will be able to carve soup bowls out of found objects, fashion crude but comfortable hammocks out of Ikea detritus, or punch tiny holes in scavenged sheets of tin to make colanders.

Or we will be able to harvest wild mushrooms.  This, in fact, was what the invitation was for: mushroom foraging at Delheim in the Cape winelands, followed by lunch.

The basket requirement seemed overly elfin, but of course they are right: when catastrophic climate change and the North Korean nuclear war and the WannaCry virus have broken our computers and destroyed our shopping malls, scavenging food will require some kind of a container.

But there’s nothing worse, when you are scouring the post-apocalyptic  roadside verge for something edible, than to spot a lovely fresh mushroom – and then not know if it’s going to kill you. Although, on the other hand, if things are really dire, you might to WANT to end it all. Either way, you need to know your death caps from your porcini.

So I listened intently as Gary Goldman, 57, former navy diver and Greek-island bar owner turned mushroom expert, gave the pre-foraging briefing at Delheim.  

Goldman’s day job is walking through forests, usually those of the Cape Peninsula, to look for mushrooms.  This makes him sound like an otherworldly hippy, but do the maths – he collects 250kg to 350kg of porcini mushrooms alone per season, and he sells them for upwards of R200 a kilogram. Then there’s the pine rings, the russulas, and countless others.

These figures are for a good year: this year has been anything but.  The drought in the Western Cape has cut Goldman’s harvest drastically, and our host at Delheim, Nora Sperling-Thiel, feared at one point that there would be no mushrooms for us to forage.

The region had its first good rains of the season just 10 days before the event in mid-June, so our ramble through the pine trees was not entirely fruitless. But Sperling-Thiel’s despair made clear the fatal flaw in my survival strategy – if climate change means more frequent droughts and greater heat, it also means no more mushrooms.

I used it as a teachable moment. Forget the future, I told myself, it doesn’t exist! Live for the moment! And in just a moment we will have lunch and lots of Delheim wine!

Lunch was delectable, thanks in large part to Goldman, who took the precaution of pre-picking enough mushrooms to feed the 40 or so participants in the event. (There’s a limit on numbers, so it’s a bit like trying to get tickets for Justin Bieber. One woman at my table had tried for two years to get in without success.)

Goldman said he had walked for four hours the day before and had collected about 4kg of pine rings (Lactarius deliciosus), shrimp russulas (Russula xerampelina), so-called because they taste of seafood, and poplar boletes (Leccinum duriusculum), that chef Bruce von Pressentin used in his tagliatelle.

 Goldman was disappointed at gathering an average of only one kilogram an hour; “normally it’s a lot more”. He had also been to a favourite spot for porcinis, and had found nothing.

He gets a bit carried away when he talks about porcinis. “Porcini. Beautiful mushrooms. How do you know it’s a porcini? The first thing I do is I take my knife and scrape that sand off and I have a sniff … it smells divine. It’s like nutty, woody … take a little piece and taste. Very nice.  Porcinis are the best. Wonderful.  Mushroom-hunters’ delights.”

Goldman  recommends cooking all mushrooms, and eating them within 24 hours, but makes an exception for porcini, which can also be shaved raw into a salad.

The ones he finds that are past their best will have greenish sponge under their caps, the polypore, which he dries. “When I dry the polypore, I grind it into a powder, and the Italian chefs buy this from me for R1,000 a kilogram. I can’t make enough of it. They put it in their risottos; porcini stock, it is wonderful.”

Jason Ambacher and Katie Trippe

One of his sidelines is selling porcini trees: oak saplings whose roots have been inoculated with porcini spore, so you can grow your own, climate change permitting.

All the mushrooms of the Western Cape came in with alien trees like oaks, pines and poplars; they don’t much like the indigenous fynbos species.

Goldman says there are six deadly species in South Africa, among them the death cap.  One of the ways to identify it is by the sac-like structure it grows from, so whenever you pick a mushroom, pick the whole thing all the way down to the bottom.  Others may not kill you, but will make you very sick.

And this is the tricky part – they change colour and shape depending on the weather and age,  so identification becomes a gamble for the novice.

 “Don’t pick after rain because they change colour. Always have an expert with you,” says Goldman.

“If you’re walking through the forest, and you find mushrooms, and they happen to have sponge or polypore under the cap, they’re all edible,” he says.

So are the cultivated button mushrooms in your local grocer, but you might lose interest in them  once you have eaten the wild ones.