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Morels

Morels

When I was nine or ten, my stepfather took me morel hunting for the first time, and we picked them out of the snow. Later, in mid-April, we picked the long-shafted ones he called horse-cocks, to make me blush, and the grays that came up around and under the new foliage. Around the first week of May, we’d find the big yellows on hillsides down to Sugar Creek.

That’s the way it went for most of my life, until, more lately, my spots started being taken over by builders and developers who built houses on them, cut down the elm trees the morels grew under, pushing me into woodlots miles from town with no trespassing signs on them and damned few morels, if I sneaked in, anyway. The landowners and their friends had already picked them – if there were any to pick.

This got desperate. One year, in my thirties, I had a heart attack, and a friend who worked in the hospital where I was taken, came in to visit me with a piece of paper on a clip board he asked me to mark, showing him where my mushrooming spots were. He did some tests on me, writing down results on his paper; said he was kidding; that he was just trying to get me to laugh. But I didn’t give him anything, and when he went into the hospital several years later, I intended to return the favor, but he died before I could do it.

This morel hunting and picking is serious business. When things slowed down around here in Indiana, many of my friends went to Cadillac Michigan and hunted in the forest preserves up there. They mostly came back with big sack fulls, but many got lost and scared to death in those forests, some falling in creeks and draws, sometimes spoiling or losing their loot.

I didn’t do that. I’m scared of getting lost. I stayed home and had some luck in early April with the blacks, as we call the earliest morels, and twice found a dishpan full of the big yellows on some land south of the college where I worked that got developed the next year. God, we need to do something about population growth!

When things got really bad, we began carefully pinching or cutting off the morels to leave their roots in the soil, then putting them in onion sacks and shaking them around trees or bushes in our own back yards, hoping to drop and spread spores there. That’s what the books said to do to get them to come up where you want them next year. Didn’t work, of course. No one knows how to cultivate them; about all you can hope for is to go back to where you found them the year before, but that seldom works either.

The very last big bunch I found was with Fred Howat. He took his son-in-law Allen and me to a field a few miles from his house with almost no trees, just tall grass and sandy soil. Not a place you’d ordinarily think was right for morels. He hated showing us this spot. Made us swear we’d never go back there without him, and we found two dishpans full under and around the only tree in the field, but it was a big elm tree. The next year the tree was bulldozed, and the field was plowed over.

Morels are romanticized in about everything I’ve read. My friend John Groppe wrote a poem on morels in his fine book, The Raid of the Grackles and Other Poems. He says the morel is, “Stark, yet alive/ emerging…/ from the blankness of creation…/ its head engorging with sweetness.” That’s all well and good, if you’re not a hunter. If you are, though, these damn fungi can drive a man to drink; smack himself with the hunting stick he carefully cut to just the right length to get him through the woods without falling down. Or falling, limping back to his car with an empty sack. Why do we do all this?

Well here’s why. Get a batch of morels, cut them in half down the middle; flush the bugs out of them, then put them in fresh, salted water for an hour or so. Can’t wait that long? A half hour then. Just add more salt. Dry them out on paper towels, then dip them lightly in a beaten-up egg, very lightly, then coat them in corn meal, or corn meal and flour, or breadcrumbs, or whatever your favorite mix is; lay them out on dry paper towels and sprinkle them with lots of garlic salt or my favorite, Badia’s Garlic with Parsley.

Take a large non-stick skillet and melt as much butter in it to just cover the bottom, cut it with a little Canola oil. Heat the skillet until the butter sputters and is close to the point when it will turn black, then get those morels in that skillet and cook them on medium-high, turning them once or twice to get them crisp. Take them out with tongs and put them back on paper towels on a plate, and call your friends to the table to eat, but not before you’ve stolen at least a half a dozen and eaten them so hot that they nearly burn your mouth.

Make sure everyone has a beer, and go at it, picking each half out with toothpicks. If you’ve enough for more batches, bless the gods that created morels, and get yourself back to the stove, after opening another beer for yourself. Time to cook. Let your guests get their own beers. What else to eat? Nothing, you damn fool. Just morels, morels, morels. They are what this fuss is all about.