Trattoria Vecchio Borgo is a small, unpretentious restaurant on a narrow side street in a little Italian town in the hilly part of Emilia-Romagna. There are hundreds of restaurants in this region of Italy built to the same design – raised decking outside overshadowed by a plastic awning with scalloped edges that provides shade during the summer months, and inside a modest number of tables set for dinner. Impeccably white tablecloths are laid over red-and-white chequered sheets. The walls are decorated with a simple yellow wash, and display cheerful photographs of the chef and his friends taken over the years. They all smile at the camera, holding baskets.
The young owner, Mery, welcomes us with a warm smile and immediately brings us cold water in a flagon. It is as well we reserved our table in advance; the whole place is booked up during the festival. Mery’s husband Cristiano is effusive in his welcome. He is a bald, extrovert and humorous man in early middle age with the robust proportions that are always encouraging in a chef. His gestures are generous and he is not above landing a decorous kiss on the ladies. He brings out a sample of his raw pasta to show us, which is some subspecies of spaghetti, laid out like skeins of wool on a platter. He makes it every day, rising at six to ensure the best results, and using no eggs, as the authentic recipe demands. We order it as primi piatti with a star ingredient to add glamour to its simple wholesomeness: fresh porcini. The best baby button mushrooms cannot be improved by adding other flavours. Onions, Cristiano tells us, kill the taste completely; herbs are only distracting. A glass of white wine from Umbria is all that is needed to accompany the dish.
The spaghetti arrives in a white china bowl with a wide rim, and it is delicious. I have never quite understood the concept of al dente, but this serving demonstrates what it means. The pasta offers a mere hint of resistance to the teeth. The porcini come finely cubed and generously heaped onto the pasta. There was some secret involved in their very light cooking, which I believe may have involved steeping them in hot water. Whatever, this is the apotheosis of the edible fungus, tasting simultaneously delicate and forthright, and with a texture that retains a certain crunchiness that does not compromise a lush aftertaste.
It is understandable that so many Italians are obsessed by porcini. Cristiano shows us a tray of the mushrooms he obtained for the kitchen earlier that day: a deep trug full of brown-capped beauties, many as big as a fist, with white stems inflated below like satisfied bellies. As we finish our meal, the mushroom collectors arrive – they are older and more weathered versions of the same faces that are pinned to the wall in the photographs. For years, these close friends have been devoted to finding special fungi in the thick woods that cover the hills around the town of Borgo Val di Taro. Porcini are central to their life and livelihood.
Every year Borgo Val di Taro holds a porcini festival, and this modest town becomes mushroom mayhem. In September 2023, brass bands play, streets and piazzas are lined with stalls, and the popular restaurants have to turn away hungry customers. The whole place is a hub of mushroom worship. For the rest of the year it is ordinary enough. Medieval ramparts built of local sandstone above the Taro river still survive on parts of its periphery and testify to its antiquity, but the old church does not boast any quattrocento masterpieces. In the old part of town narrow streets are lined with flat-fronted, four-storey dwellings, and include a few grander houses belonging to wealthier families; their sandstone walls are concealed by rendering tinted yellow or sienna, peeling off in places; in Italy this decay makes an atmospheric virtue out of slight dilapidation. The streets are closely paved with square red porphyry setts from Trentino, attractively arranged in fan design.
The suburbs comprise wider streets lined with prosperous villas, as in other towns in this part of Italy. In summer, the Taro is small and quiet, but the coarse gravel spreads that border the flow testify to violent winter storms draining rapidly off the surrounding hills. This is hard to imagine in the dry heat of the porcini festival. Now the Via Nazionale that runs through the middle of the old town is lined with stalls offering all manner of local produce besides fungi – great white wheels of cheese as large as car tyres, and a gallery of salamis, cured meats and sticky cakes; but in the wide Piazza Manara, porcini dominate everything. Great baskets of the precious delicacy are arranged by quantity and quality. Stallholders vie with one another for the best display. Choice specimens carefully arranged in shallow boxes retail at sixty euros, offering a range of cap colours from pale tan to rich umber. The soil has been brushed from each fungus to ensure mycological perfection.
Neighbouring stalls offer dried porcini: not the miserable little packets on sale in English delicatessens, but great drifts of finely sliced examples dried carefully in the sun to allow them to be stored safely and used over the next year. Many connoisseurs prefer to employ the dried fungi in cooking for their enhanced intensity of flavour. A few euros will buy a handful. The dried fungi are graded in quality from ottimo downwards; it looks as if larger specimens are the cheaper choice. Close examination reveals that there are tiny holes in some of the dried items – these will have been where the occasional fly larva feasted on the soft flesh, but the drying process will have reduced any uninvited guests to dust. The smallest and most flawless ‘button’ porcini are preserved in fat jars under olive oil – the plump shape of the jars mirrors the rotund form of the stems of these babies. They are mostly found in the smarter shops, and they are expensive. It is impossible to guess how many kilograms of the famous fungi are on display along the Via Nazionale – several hundred, perhaps? It is certainly a profusion of porcini, a plethora, an extravagance, a bounteous celebration. I have never seen its like before.
The area around Borgo Val di Taro is uniquely productive. The low ground near the river has been terraced to make fields for livestock, retained by grey drystone walls constructed from roughly shaped sandstone blocks. Fungi appear on the higher wooded slopes that extend far into the hills beyond the town. In the morning, the peaks are concealed in mist, which gradually disperses as the sun gathers strength, but for a while the distant prospect resembles the landscapes beloved of Chinese artists, where much is hinted at but little revealed. The forests are mostly deciduous trees: oaks of several kinds, beech and sweet chestnut.
According to Cristiano, the ground beneath chestnut trees yields the best porcini. The local hunters are skilled at spotting their prey tucked into the leaf litter even though the brown caps match the colour of fallen leaves rather well. The forest floor is almost clear of the brambles that often bedevil walkers in our own woodlands. Instead, bright-red mountain cranberries flourish in small clearings. The porcini may grow in groups, but never far from the trees with which they have an intimate mycorrhizal relationship. Few of the trees are veterans, as the forest is carefully managed; a disease is affecting the sweet chestnuts which is ameliorated by coppicing, but this apparently does not reduce the fungal yield. Porcini look at their most appealing when they erupt from a mossy bank, young and firm. I wince at the overused word ‘iconic’, but it must apply to the shape of the young porcini being exploited time and again in everything from wooden nutcrackers (olive wood, with screw-down technology) to pepper pots and pincushions.
The townsfolk believe that the high humidity accompanying the morning mistiness – ultimately derived from breezes from the seas to the west – together with a warm climate in summer following snow in winter combine to produce perfect conditions for fungal fruiting. The nutrient-rich forest floor must contain a vast interlocking mat of fungal mycelium, just awaiting the right moment in summer and autumn to create an eruption of multifarious mushrooms and toadstools: the porcini are but one of a cornucopia of fungal riches.
Under the portico in the main square in Borgo Val di Taro an exhibition of some of these riches has been assembled by the regional fungus gruppo, featuring specimens tucked into mossy cushions to approximate their occurrence in the field – and to stop them drying out. In Italy, many regions have such dedicated fungus groups, some of them remarkably scholarly, and all happy to explain fungi to the tyro. Borgo Val di Taro lies close to the junction of Emilia-Romagna, Liguria and Tuscany, and has its own club of devotees. The local expert is a young woman who patiently explains to bystanders the differences between porcini and the usual cultivated mushroom, staple of the supermarket. Many Britons know and eat only the latter.
She demonstrates that the most striking distinction lies on the under-surface of the cap: the supermarket mushroom has gills (chocolate-coloured on the demonstration specimen) while the mature porcini bear what looks like a yellowish sponge in the same position. A close look reveals that the ‘sponge’ is actually comprised of hundreds of fine tubes about a millimetre across terminating in closely packed pores. This structure is what distinguishes porcini (Boletus) from mushrooms (Agaricus). Both tubes and gills are the whole purpose of the fungus – this is where the minute spores are produced that propagate the species. The difference in conformation of the spore ‘factories’ is so fundamental that porcini and mushrooms are placed in entirely different biological families. Porcini belong within the genus Boletus, and these only superficially resemble regular mushrooms in having soft flesh making up a cap and a stem – they are otherwise fundamentally distinct. Our young demonstrator gestures at the table in front of her to show that there are many and various kinds of these pore-bearing fungi, and emphasises that they should collectively be called ‘boletes’ – something I shall do throughout this book. One reason for the distinctive taste of porcini is that they are quite a different kettle of fish (to mix metaphors disgracefully) from the mushroom on sale in every supermarket.
Next, the expert gets down to detail, the real nitty-gritty, and most people stay to hear more. She explains that there are actually four different species of Boletus that are lumped together as porcini. You cannot tell them apart when cooked, and even the fresh specimens demand very close inspection. In all of them the pores begin white and darken to yellow as the spores mature. The commonest species is what the French call the Cep, Boletus edulis, which can grow under many different trees. I know it well. The Latin species name leaves no doubt about its edibility. It has a pale brown, convex, smooth cap, and when very fresh this is usually edged with a thin white line. The stem is lighter-coloured, often inflated below, and the upper part carries on its surface a network of narrow, raised white ridges. It is sometimes helpful to tilt the stem towards the light to see them. Bronze Bolete, Boletus aereus, is often darker, sometimes nearly black, and with brown tones on the stem as well, and in Britain is usually found under oaks; it is rather rare. Pine Bolete, Boletus pinophilus, is very similar, but often more slender, with red-brown cap tones, and prefers to live with pines. Finally, there is the Summer Bolete, Boletus reticulatus, which took me a very long time to be sure of its identity, because it really is very like the Cep in many features. It does appear early in the fungus season, and now I know it from its subtly furry cap texture. I could not understand all of the Italian of our guide, but the fact that she was stroking the cap of the mushroom as one might a cat suggests that she was noticing the same thing (the stem is also flushed pale brown). I must add that when you cut into the flesh of all these porcini, there is a pleasant, nutty smell, and there is no colour change; the flesh of many boletes turns quickly blue or green when damaged, and several have unpleasant odours.
This list of minutiae will give some idea of the subtleties of fungus identification in the field. Birders will know the comparable difficulties in identifying small warblers, but at least the fungi stay put and don’t hop off into thick cover. For those who might say ‘pooh, how can you be certain?’, there is now the tool of molecular sequencing – an appropriate segment of DNA extracted from the fungus reveals how one sample relates to others. Samples of the same species will cluster together. All the porcini boletes are known to be ‘true’ species, as determined by the latest technology. It is impressive that pioneer mycologists more than a century ago had such a critical feel for these different species – fungi that even today cause lesser mortals to scratch their heads.
After the talk I ask our demonstrator about the Bitter Bolete (Tylopilus felleus). She does not see this species in northern Italy. Perhaps it is as well, because this is one bolete that can easily be confused with Boletus edulis. It is a similar colour and likes to grow in comparable places. One cap of the Bitter Bolete among a batch of porcini can ruin the taste of a whole dish. When it is mature, the unpleasant pretender can be recognised easily by its pink pores, but while it is of the petite dimensions preferred by gourmets, the pores are white like those of its delicious cousins. At this stage its only good distinguishing feature is a strong, raised brownish network on the stem. It is optional to nibble (and then spit out) the tiniest piece from the cap, when its extremely bitter taste gives it away at once. Fortunately, this pretender is usually rare, but one year I found it in abundance in a particular patch of mixed woodland in Oxfordshire. I can think of no better example to demonstrate the necessity of knowing how to recognise individual species by closely examining their every feature, with a good book to hand.
In southern Britain the numbers of porcini vary greatly from year to year. In Borgotaro they are reliable. In a dry year like 2023 they were still to be found at higher altitudes, tracking cooler and moister conditions. Even so, there are fluctuations; the oldest inhabitants still remember the annus mirabilis of 1952, when the porcini themselves made miniature mountains. They have been exploited for centuries in the same area. The local museum holds an unparalleled collection relating to the history of porcini, including an account of a document dated 1606 describing a mycological present sent by a Borgo nobleman, Flaminio Platoni, to Ranuccio I of the grand Farnese dynasty in Parma, where the fungi were used to great effect by a famous chef called Caro Nascia.
By the nineteenth century, it was reported that almost all local families were involved with picking, pickling or drying. There was even a special word for the slicing process for the latter – sfogliatura. Pellegrino Artusi (1820–1911) in his book Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well described the subsequent routine: ‘For two or three days keep them continuously exposed to the sun, then put them in stands and keep them in ventilated air and also again in the sun until they are completely dry.’ In this condition Borgotaro porcini were finding their way as far as the USA to satisfy homesick Italians who had been forced by poverty to settle far away. My own drying technique does not rely on the unpredictable English sunshine, but uses the slow warmth of underfloor heating to the same end. Thin slices cannot be put into dry jars until they have the same texture as vegetable crisps. I notice one difference: the Italians do not remove the tubes of mature specimens, as I do, because I find their texture too greasy. Unlike mushroom gills, the tubes can be easily removed with a firm sideways push of the thumb.
The porcini boletes are widespread; they can be found throughout Europe, and further afield into North America and Asia. Everywhere they grow they acquire a different common name. In Britain they are Penny Buns, which is a nice description of the colour, feel and shape of the cap, although it is many years since buns cost a penny. Cep is also widely used, but it really should be spelled as it is in France: ‘Cèpe’. In Germany it is Steinpilz; in Norway it is Karl Johan’s Sopp; in Sweden Stensopp; in Russian Belyy Grib. I suspect that there will be further special words for this special fungus in Basque and Armenian. This linguistic babel proves the value of the scientific name, as that is everywhere the same: Boletus edulis. I will use both English common names (capitalised hereafter) and scientific names in this book. My Russian friends tell me that they inhale the rich smell from their jars of dried Ceps when the long winters make them feel depressed. My Swedish friends tell me they have a word for the bitter ‘fake Boletus’ (Tylopilus felleus) – Gallsopp. I could not think of a better one.
The Borgotaro area has been awarded a unique fungal equivalent of L’Appellation d’origine contrôlée. The productive region was granted Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status in 1996, a distinction of which the town is very proud. The noticeboards around the civic buildings tell you about it wherever there is an opportunity. Fungi from Borgotaro are as characteristic as Parmesan cheese from Parma. Quite apart from the porcini, these hills are famous for the variety and abundance of innumerable other fungi. Europe’s leading mycology professor in the twentieth century, Meinhard Moser (1924–2002), regularly came here from Innsbruck to advance his research and made a particular study of the many uncommon boletes that grow near the famous comestibles. Moser wrote the first technical fungus identification handbook I ever owned (published in 1960). When I stayed in the rural Trentino family home of my friend, the distinguished mycologist Marco Floriani, not so far away from Borgotaro, I was told, proudly, ‘Professor Moser slept in that bed’, as if it had been Queen Elizabeth I.
A few other species of delicious fungi are on show on the festival stalls. Dark, warty balls the size of hens’ eggs are recherché Black Truffles (Tuber melanosporum), of which more below. Then the mushroom Italians call ovolo is the most beautiful money can buy. It is golden, and its cap shines in the sunlight like a huge cabochon gem. Several stalls offer it for sale, but it is evidently a rare find compared with boletes. The ovolo is reported to be delicious, but I have never eaten it. The mushroom arises out of a white ‘egg’ – an enclosing bag of tissue – and smaller examples just pushing out from their nursery have the feel of a jack-in-the-box frozen in motion. When it is mature, the gills and stem are yellow, and on the stem there hangs a conspicuous, white collar-like ring (annulus), while the pale ‘egg’ from which it arose remains as a cleft cup (volva) at the base. This is Amanita caesarea, Caesar’s Mushroom, and it was a favourite food of the Emperor Claudius (d. AD 54). According to the historian Tacitus, Claudius was murdered by means of poisonous fungi administered by his wife, Agrippina, which would make him the most mycologically embroiled of all despots.[1]
Given the elite status of the ovolo in the kitchen, it is ironic that the most poisonous toadstool we know is another Amanita, the Death Cap (Amanita phalloides), which also arises from an ‘egg’ and has a ring on the stem. I have never been fortunate enough to find a Caesar’s Mushroom, but I have had many close encounters with the Death Cap, albeit never on a plate. It is a handsome toadstool, very similar in proportions to Caesar’s, although some think it ‘sinister’, because of its deserved reputation. If as little as half a cap is consumed it kills slowly, painfully and inexorably. Many books describe the details, the worst aspect of which is that there are periodic remissions of symptoms, false hope dawns, before the agonies of poisoning return even more horribly.
The account in my Larousse Gastronomique (of all things) is very comprehensive and spares the reader no grisly details. I do not feel compelled to repeat them, though I have to emphasise that the lethal fungus does have to be ingested to do its work. Touching it won’t kill you. The cap colour is a distinctive yellowish green, often with an odd streaky look, while the gills and ring are white, and the stem carries weak greenish bands, so only the ‘bag’ at its base is a shared feature with the ovolo. If there is a lot of rain the cap can fade to yellow, and it might pose more of a danger in this state, although it is never orange or golden. In Britain, there are some years when the Death Cap is quite common – so numerous in beech woodland on chalk near my home that my wife Jackie and I christened one locality ‘Death Cap Valley’. I confess that en masse these lethal toadstools are a rather beautiful sight. Sadly, the ovolo is yet to be found in Britain, but since the climate is warming this is no longer as unlikely as it once was. The Isle of Wight would be a plausible landing point, where a number of rare and southerly Amanita species have already been recorded and there are plenty of beech trees. ‘The island’ was also the site of a fatal Death Cap poisoning in 2008, when the toadstools were picked in Ventnor Botanical Garden, apparently mistaken for a mushroom variety that was eaten in Thailand. The family at first blamed the sausages.
Finding Ceps in Britain is much more hit and miss than in Borgotaro. In some years they can be found with no trouble; in others they just do not show up, or when they do appear they have been discovered by slugs and flies long before you stumble across them. Occasionally, they are just perfect. A group of three Ceps I discovered in Oxfordshire growing from a mossy bank could not be surpassed. No slug had defaced them. The moss made them seem as if they were presented on green baize as a gift. They were young and firm, almost as if made from a kind of ceramic. The caps were uniformly the colour of lightly finished toast except where they faded to white at their very edge, the stems satisfyingly convex with a suggestion of Palaeolithic fertility figurines. The sunny autumn day was as near flawless as could be, with a few beech leaves turning colour and preparing to fall, but most still hanging on to await the first frost. A sunbeam picked out the boletes to add the final blessing. It seemed almost sacrilege to pick these porcinesque paragons. But I did. The correct way is to twist them gently out of the ground, doing minimal damage to the network of fungal mycelium from which they arise. They were then placed reverentially into a flat-bottomed fungus basket woven from willow, with something of the care that ensured the survival of Moses on the Nile.
When I started to recognise and collect Boletus in the last century, I was one of very few people scouting in the woods. It was not something that British people did. A good friend living in the New Forest would alert me when the Ceps were about, and in some years they were abundant. We did not give a thought to over-picking. Then we started to notice that others had been there before us. The Ceps had been cut off close to the ground, leaving pale little discs of sliced stems behind as evidence. We had to search longer and harder. It was clear that something had changed. We surmised that fresh Ceps were becoming part of the gourmet restaurant’s bill of fare, providing a niche for commercial fungus hunters: they wanted to find a Borgo Val di Taro in Britain. Then, in the twenty-first century more people from the Czech Republic or Poland came to work in the United Kingdom, and in these countries Cep hunting is a national pastime. Poles go mad for their Borowiki. No doubt they wondered why the English seemed relatively indifferent to their woodland treasures. Around London, mushroom hunting was their weekend treat. The problem was that so many fungi were turned upside down to see if they had the pores beneath the cap diagnostic of the boletes. I have encountered woods where almost every milkcap or brittlegill has been turned over, gills upward, innocent victims of porcini mania. In this state their spore production is halted, and the reproduction of the species is compromised. This is distressing. A flower lover might feel a similar sense of dismay if she visited a favourite orchid meadow to find all the wildflowers trampled. Even worse, we heard tales of squads of ignorant ‘pickers’ going to the New Forest and collecting everything to take to an expert to sort out the profitable mushrooms from the rest, and the bycatch – innocent fungi all – summarily jettisoned.
Protection from this kind of fungal mayhem is difficult to enforce. We do not have many ancient, unfertilised open forests left in the United Kingdom, unlike the extensive tracts that cover central Europe and the spine of Italy. Forests that are easily accessible from cities are particularly vulnerable. Many of them are Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and it is now illegal to pick there. Epping Forest, north-east of London, led the way; Burnham Beeches to the west of the capital followed, as did Nottingham Forest in the Midlands, and now the New Forest down south is protected, even though the number of successful prosecutions for illegal picking are hardly worth counting.
Now here is a paradox. In Borgotaro bolete picking has continued for centuries and still the baskets return brim full of bounty. The local hunters have special rights, but for out-of-town enthusiasts it is possible to purchase daily tickets for a few euros that entitle the visitors to harvest fungi in the hills. At the height of the fungus season cars queue to get to the booth that issues the appropriate permits. Each picker is limited to three kilograms of boletes per day. This would be a truly wondrous yield from a day in my own Chiltern Hills, west of London. Yet we know that the harvest in Italy shows no apparent sign of diminishing, even though the abundance of fungi fluctuates from year to year. Picking has not reduced, let alone exterminated the porcini.
I am reminded of a story I used to read to my children, The Magic Porridge Pot, in which a cauldron full of food would magically refill itself no matter how much was taken from it. In real life there is no such thing as a free lunch. However, it cannot be claimed that picking boletes for the table is driving them to extinction in these Italian forests. One plausible reason: the porcini itself is only the reproductive part of the fungus; the body of the fungus is the mycelium – that extensive and dense network of living fungal threads within the forest soil associated with tree roots of chestnut or beech. This web does not die with the plucking of the Cep. It can live for many years, even moving to adjacent trees. The fungi are nurtured by millions of minute threads scavenging the soil for minerals and other nutrients, and succoured in turn by the photosynthetic work of the trees themselves. For the fungi of Borgo Val di Taro, it is almost a magic porridge pot.
Near the end of our stay in Borgotaro we passed through the ancient gate of the town named Portello, where fungi were traded in past centuries. A series of steep sandstone steps lead through an arch towards the Via Nazionale. Laboriously climbing towards us, a local man with slightly wild hair and wearing a leather jerkin was carrying a woven willow basket over each arm, laden with porcini. He must have returned from the hills on the other side of the river, no doubt en route to replenish some of the heaps that had sold during the festival. This was a timeless moment. A similar man in similar garb carrying the same deep rectangular baskets could have taken those steps at the time the Farnese dynasty were still omniscient in Parma. Even the porcini were unchanged.