Good ingredients fuel good memories

I just bought some chanterelle mushrooms at Costco, and I’m sorry to say that I’m not sorry at all. Yes, I’m a firm believer in buying locally; in fact I just spilled a fine local cider on my keyboard—but come on. Everyone has his price, and chanterelles are mine. Remember that when I’m in Congress.

This was the first time I’d ever seen them in a package, though, and it seemed kind of odd. When I first made their acquaintance in California, they were carried through the back door of the kitchen by people who looked as dilapidated as their baskets. Some of these guys were just off-the-grid hippies who had found a quasi-legal harvest, and some could have grown mushrooms behind their ears. They would stand in the back, shuffling nervously out of habit (though there was nothing to be ashamed of here: someone in every kitchen sleeps in a car), and mumble a request to see the chef. We cooks would whoop and holler and scream that the season had started and make our foragers feel like they were at the head of a parade. Seeing chanterelles in cellophane felt almost like speed dating. I bought them anyway.

Certain smells are said to trigger memories better than any other stimulus, but I found that cleaning and cutting the mushrooms opened a box of old stories all by itself. You can’t wash chanterelles in water, you know; they absorb it like a sponge. Gourmet magazines list the washing of mushrooms high on their list of culinary sins, and it doesn’t occur to them that some of their acolytes own restaurants and take their undifferentiated commandments seriously. So I came in to work one afternoon to find that we no longer washed the poop—sorry; the growing medium—off our white button mushrooms, we instead were to brush each of them gently. Twenty pounds of them. Per shift.

That only lasted a day or two. I don’t know if someone gave the owner a demonstration of the button mushroom’s relative imperviousness to water, or threatened her with a tire iron, but we were shortly back to washing them.

Chanterelle season was a big thing at Narsai’s, a hu-hu restaurant of sainted memory in the East Bay. Narsai himself, in addition to possessing a kitchen vocabulary of amazing richness and complexity (he seemed to have a different mode of address for each employee; mine was “God d*mn it to f*ck, Jon!”), knew quite a lot about food. When a forager came in one afternoon, he looked in the basket and told him he’d buy one mushroom to show why he wouldn’t buy the rest. He pushed up a sleeve of his suit jacket, squeezed the poor victim over the pot sink (the mushroom, not the forager) and got almost two tablespoons of water out of it. “When the cap is blistered like that,” he explained, “it means it’s been rained on. Put them in a pan, they don’t sauté, they boil.”

And you couldn’t have that at Narsai’s, since his partner Sam had a pound or so of sautéed mushrooms with dinner two or three times a week, and was picky about their quality. I was often the designated ’shroom-boy, and I was careful to head off any possible resentment of Sam’s excesses by stealing liberally from the pan. After a night of mushrooms on this, that and the other, we’d go out to Chez Panisse and order the chanterelle pizza in the bistro upstairs. ‘Twas the season.

It was a real treat to be involved in a regionwide hysteria; it’s sort of like having your boys go to the Series every fall. Every chef had a stable of foragers, every cook had a stable of recipes, and customers would wait for the season like Buddhist Deadheads sensing the reincarnation of Jerry Garcia. I’ve read about some little cafés in the truffle-snuffling regions of France where people will happily buy a $50 plate of scrambled eggs with truffles during the “saison.” This was like that, at a somewhat more reasonable price.

But for an old crochety cook, half the pleasure of good ingredients is the stories they tell. They seem to take an active interest in reminding you why you do what you do for a living, and why, even after a good little while, you still kind of like it.