Last night I ate the tastiest mushroom I’ve ever eaten in my life. Really.
I sauteed it in olive oil with a dab of butter. Threw in a dollop of sweet sherry, a pour of boullion for moisture, et voila–Ummmm-um!
Given my recent column on foraging, you might assume that I picked this mushroom myself. I’m not that brave; I don’t know an amanita from a beefsteak.
No, somebody else foraged this mushroom. And therein lies the tale.
We have this friend. Tom. Tom’s an adventurer, a man’s man, a bad boy. The kind of guy who would kayak around the world, in spite of a foot badly lamed in an early motorcycle accident. The kind of guy who’ll tell it like it is, even if gets him punched in the face. The kind of guy who’d intervene in a robbery and get shot and live to tell the tale. Who, in fact, did just that in his errant youth.
Tom’s fearless. To a fault.
His wife is a saint.
They live a few blocks from us. Tom was driving down a street in the ‘hood when he saw a guy up in a tree. Being Tom, he stopped and asked the man what he was doing.
“He was Italian, and he had this thick accent,” Tom told me. “He said, ‘I’m picking oyster mushrooms.’”
The man said oyster mushrooms grew rampant on trees in the neighborhood. There was, in fact, an especially fine crop of them in a tree just around the corner from where we live, on Ocean Avenue. Unfortunately, this particular stand was at the top of the tree. The tree was tall. And it stood in somebody’s front yard.
The man shrugged. Alas, what can one do?
Tom went home and got a rickety 50-foot ladder and his daughter, who’s in her 20s. He called a young buddy who lives in our building, a mountaineer, and told him that he had some climbing for him.
The mountaineer showed up with ropes, axes and carabiners. Tom tucked him into his car, and off they drove.
They found the tree quite easily: it stood in the front yard of the only house among a block of apartment buildings. Tom parked the car, got out, stepped through the open gate in the eight-foot chain-link fence that separated the house, and the tree, from the sidewalk. He walked up the front steps and rang the bell.
Nobody answered.
Tom propped his decrepit ladder against the tree and the sidewalk side of the fence, and he sent the mountaineer up. The mountaineer ascended-up, up, up-to the top of the tree, while Tom held the creaking ladder steady.
Ocean Avenue is a very busy urban thoroughfare, but Brooklyn is still New York. Do what you do with authority, and nobody will question you. And so it was: nobody stopped to challenge the trio. Not even the police, who patrol the area with great zeal.
The mushrooms were clustered on the sawed-off top of a stout branch, inside the fence but above the sidewalk. The mountaineer clung to the tree and lopped off the mushrooms, and tossed them down to Tom’s daughter, who put them in a bag.
Tom estimates that they gathered about eight pounds of mushrooms. He went home and cooked up a batch, fed them to his family and the mountaineer. He even convinced his wife to eat them.
Nobody died.
So he came to my door. Did I want a mushroom?
I hesitated. The thing was huge, eight or ten inches across.
Well…It’s kind of illegal…
Ah, but it was delicious.
And we didn’t die.
I called Tom’s voice mail, and thanked him profusely for the illicit treat.
This afternoon, I walked past the tree. It was very high. It was definitely behind the fence. There were still mushrooms at the top, on that cut branch, on the side of it that faced the house.
I came home to find a message from Tom on our phone. He said, “There are a lot more mushrooms left on the tree. If Paul wants to go with me, we can pick them-just let me know.”
It was tempting. But…
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Easy to tell if a mushroom is poisonous, eat it, and if you die, it is poisonous.
I am the mountaineer in your building. It was Tom who ascended and it was me holding the 50 foot ladder steady.
Leo, I think it’s too bad we’ve given up that nifty old tradition of the Royal Taster. Of course, given my station in life, I’d most likely be the taster herself, rather than the Royalty…
Hey, Mountaineer. Damn. TOM climbed the ladder? That’s even better than my version. So…were you there just to look pretty?
I think those are called “tree ears” in China. Not that it makes any difference.
Hmm. Not sure about that; the “tree ears” I get at the Chinese grocery look more like a dried version of slightly woodier, layered mushrooms like those you find closer to the base of a tree. But I might be wrong. These things are huge and white, and tender once you get past the middle of ‘em.
But I *do* love the name!
Sue-
Having just recovered from a severe (but blissfully short) bout of food poisoning (following a purely coincidental dinner with Tom and Gina), it seemed like an ideal time to read your blog about your recent toadstool–uh–mushroom experience.
No doubt about it, your friendly neighborhood mushroom purveyor has never met an adventure–or misadventure–he didn’t like. The mold (pun intended) was unquestionably broken when Tom was made. But for his eccentric presence, the world would be a a safer, but less interesting place. I credit him with helping me make (or to be precise, avoid) an important career decision. Mired in what I perceived to be a dead-end job as a staff lawyer for the New York Stock Exchange, I had just been offered the position of “Inspector General” of the Board of Education (yeah, me and Danny Kaye). Informed by the Chancellor of that hidebound bureaucracy that all that remained between me and my appointment was going through the “formality” of meeting with the members of the Board. (People have died of old age enduring lesser formalities.)
It was at this precise time in history (1979) that I met Tom at the home of our local Assemblyman as part of a “meet your new neighbors” party that my wife, Riki, hosted on his behalf. One of the newcomers to our Ditmas Park neighborhood was Tom,whose Hoosier-like affability caused me to (wrongly) peg him as a mid-western immigrant to Brooklyn (he grew up in nearby Manhasset). Minutes into our conversation, he asked the typical New York question, “what do you do?” When I told him about my impending position of the Board of Ed, he calmly, but assertively, stated, “you can’t take that job; it’s not for you.” When I later told Riki about the conversation, we agreed that if a total stranger thought that such a major career move was not for me, I should, perhaps, re-think it. Within a couple of months, I had joined Merrill Lynch, where I went on to have a long and interesting career, recently retiring after twenty-eight years.
At the time, I wasn’t sure whether Tom was a goofball or a seer. Now, over thirty-years later, I realize I was right on both counts– and consider my life all the richer for it.
John