Mushrooms are a big deal to my French wife. In fact, they’re a big deal to her whole family—and to the French side of my family. Now that I think about it, mushrooms are a big deal to about 95 percent of France.
The other five percent struggle with picking things up off the ground and eating them, let alone a fungus. I don’t really identify with these French people. They’re mostly from Paris.
I was introduced to mushroom foraging a few years ago while visiting M’s parents in the alpine town of Chamonix. A rainy early fall found the girolles popping up everywhere, so M and her mom were hellbent on reaping the harvest.
If you think of mushroom foraging as some sort of hippy froufrou group activity, you’re sadly mistaken. Mushroom hunters, the French ones at least, are savagely territorial. When they discover a spot that’s especially abundant, they protect their territoire with a savagery normally reserved for honey badgers and old-timey gold miners.
In the event that you’re foraging and you happen upon other people, you quickly hide whatever mushrooms you’ve found in your backpack, cram your knife in your pocket, and pretend like you’re just out for a leisurely stroll, even if you’re kilometers from anything resembling a path. You also act mildly unpleasant in hopes that they’ll go away.
My wife—a committed endurance athlete—and my stepmother—a former mountain guide—approach mushroom hunting like an Olympic sport, bringing a whole new level to the hunt, scrambling up and down twelve-degree slopes at breakneck speeds, seemingly pulling scores of girolles out of thin air. (Or thin dirt, I should say.)
Girolles, also known as chanterelles, are bright yellow and wavy. You’d think being bright yellow would make them easy to spot, but next time you look at a forest floor in autumn, notice that a third of the leaves on the ground are also bright yellow.
Furthermore, girolles like to hide under fallen leaves. It often happens that you find one little mushroom poking out from under a leaf, so you start pulling leaves back to reveal more mushrooms.
Note how I wrote “you” as opposed to “I.” This is because, on most hunts, I underachieve compared to M’s gold medal family. That first weekend of hunting in Chamonix, I only found one mushroom over the course of several hours of foraging. This gave me a vague sense of accomplishment until my wife explained that my stepmother had carefully unearthed the girolle in question when I wasn’t looking so that I could find it.
So, I enjoy mushroom foraging but I’m still pretty mediocre at it. I’m okay with this. It’s just another facet of my shift to rural France. Until now, the extent of my foraging has been the mushroom section of the produce aisle at Whole Foods—and even that gives me anxiety because of the wide selection. I prefer when someone else buys my mushrooms for me.
It’s late fall now. Girolle season is pretty much over, but we’re still in bolete season, so shortly upon my arrival at La Villatte, M and I rugged up and went out to stake some secret spots.
Boletes are generally known in America as porcini mushrooms. In France, they’re also called cèpes, although, according to the Guide Vigot des Champignons (thoughtfully left behind by the previous owners of La Villatte), the only true cèpe is the legendary Cèpe de Bordeaux, sometimes knows as the “King Bolete,” it’s widely regarded as one of the rarest and most delicious mushrooms. M claims finding a Cèpe de Bordeaux can be a “once in a lifetime event.”
Whether they’re from Bordeaux or not, boletes are really hard to find. They’re brown, so they blend in with the other two-thirds of the leaves on the forest floor. They make girolles look like little neon “eat me” signs.
So, we bundled up and braved the rain to find unfindable mushrooms.
The first couple of outings went well—for M, at least. We found a field filled with yet another species of mushroom called coulemels. They’re known in english as parasols and they live up to that name. They’re big, white umbrellas that you can spot a mile away. According to M, they don’t taste as great. They taste pretty great to me, so I suspect this culinary judgement to be a prestige issue.
On the first day, M also found a whole row of boletes hiding amongst some birch trees. I walked right by them.
The next day, we took M’s sister S to our new secret spot—blood trumps territoriality. It went exactly like the day before, only with two people effortlessly finding boletes as I wandered blindly. At one point, S found three in a row then pointed to a fourth smaller one and said, “Voilà, c'est pour toi.” I wanted to tell her that I didn’t want her damn charity, but I couldn’t think of the word in French, so I meagerly pick the tiny mushroom.
(For what it’s worth, the word is charité.)
Still, it was a beautiful morning. The air is clear and fresh. The heavy-duty Oboz hiking boots M talked me into buying at REI were completely impermeable. I felt rugged. Ignorant, but rugged.
I completely managed to eradicate this little shred of dignity a couple days later.
M was feeling under the weather, so I headed out to find my own secret mushroom spot. I started by following a vague animal trail behind our neighbor’s chicken farm. Eventually, the animal track turned into no track. I continued on, bushwhacking through the forest with my pocketknife, trying to ignore the various spikes and thorns poking at my hands.
Before I knew it, I was submerged in blackberry brambles. They tore at my jacket, ripped my jeans, and yanked the green beanie my daughter had made me as a going away present off my head.
And it started raining. Hard.
Normally, I’d turn on my phone at this point to check the map for the closest road, but I was between carriers, having relinquished my US AT&T plan while waiting for my French Free Mobile plan to send a sim card. I had the sense to download the area in Google Maps, but the app was decidedly vague. Clearly, the Google Street View camera car had yet to drive through this particular patch of impassable forest.
All the app would tell me is that there is probably a road, like, kind of in that direction. The blackberry bushes refused to let me go “kind of in that direction.” Eventually, I stumbled onto a pasture. I pathetically hopped the barbed wire fence, breathed a sigh of relief, and checked for cows.
Beef are serious business in this region, which makes for a lot of burly cattle. S warned us that these cows can be aggressive, which I wouldn’t believe had I not once been charged by a neighbor’s bull, saved only by a thin electrified fence, which my daughter was talked into touching the next day by her step-sibling.
Potential bovine violence in mind, I made my way through several fields, skirting those that contained cows, working my way towards a combination of “kind of in that direction” and north-west, which was probably the direction of La Villatte.
Eventually, I was forced to cross the middle of a cow-filled field, which neither the cows nor I were terribly excited about. I prayed they’d run off at the sight of me, as cows sometimes do. They did not, holding their ground, offering steely side-eye stares as I minced through their turf.
I made my way across un-cow-scathed and jumped a fence into the neighboring forest. I found a trail, only to get lost again because it wasn’t a trail, but rather a muddy, dry creek bed that just gave up the ghost after a few hundred meters.
Waist-deep in blackberry brambles. I panicked slightly, feeling a lot like Snow White in that scene where she runs through the haunted forest as branches form jagged hands that tear at her dress. (The tree hands probably would have also stolen her beanie, if she had the sense to wear one.)
I quelled my panic and, after several false starts and a solid refusal to push deep into the blackberries again, I stumbled out onto a trail. Tractor tracks indicated this was a real one. I had no idea where I was, so I headed north, figuring the whole fiasco had started with me heading south.
It turns out this was the same trail I’d started on. I was home in twenty minutes. That evening, a review of the happy-to-cooperate-from-the-safety-of-the-living-room Google Maps app showed me that at no point was I more than two miles from La Villatte.
And I didn’t see one damn mushroom the whole time.
A couple days later, M and I went for a hike around Mount Dore, a lovely little ski town 45 minutes away. Sort of a poor man’s Chamonix.
We planned a 10-mile expedition traversing the peaks surrounding the little town, forgetting that, unlike Southern California, it snows here in November.
Shortly after hitting the tree line, we abandoned the complete circuit due to the serious conditions up ahead. It wasn’t pickax and rope serious, but certainly not the sort of hike one does in running shoes and two layers, one being a t-shirt.
We took a lower path, still a pleasant hike—or at least I told myself that. In the back of my head, it felt like another defeat. I love France. I’ve wanted to be here from the moment I left twenty-plus years ago. But it’s tough being out of my element, not doing the things I’ve grown vaguely accomplished at in my adulthood. Snow? Mushrooms? I’ve gone from 200-mile epic bike rides to considering it a good day when I don’t get trampled by livestock.
As I brooded along, I spotted a leaf on the side of the trail that looked strange. It was brown, wet from rain, but it was missing the veins. I leaned in for a closer look. It was a mushroom. A bolete.
I pointed it out to M, having no idea what I’d found, but seeking validation anyway. Her reaction surprised me. “Jesus Christ!” she shouted. I was trying to figure out what I did wrong when she said, “You found a king bolete!” It was a Cèpe de Bordeaux.
With my little blackberry-bramble-battle blade and hands still scratched and scabbed, I carefully cut the mushroom free of its mycelium. It weighed a solid two pounds.
We carefully transported it carefully down the hill and home—after stopping at the incongruously named Café Le Petit Paris in Mont Dore for mulled wine, of course.
My cèpe was a little waterlogged, but still tasted amazing with crusted salmon and a glass of Coteaux de Lyonnaise.
Admittedly, I had no idea that I’d spotted the white rhino of French mushrooms, but I wasn’t about to let me ignorance get in the way of this victory. I may be a stranger in a strange land, but there’s one thing I know. I can hunt boletes.
And that’s an excellent start.