In Pursuit of the Porcini
Once again, the maggots have beaten me to the porcinis. Jenna found the first lone porcini over the weekend, on a hike with a friend from our undergraduate years. With whiteish pores and a plump, reticulate stem, I immediately knew this was the prized cep, or king bolete (Boletus edulis). “Seeing is Boleting,” as the mushroom hunter’s adage goes, and once we were aware of the porcini presence, we all started to spot them with some regularity throughout the trail. Most were growing alone or with one or two comrades, though we discovered one goldmine of a hillside that was littered with small, early specimens. This spot too began as a single porcini, but as we glanced down the slope and focused our vision we began to notice many small caps barely lifting up the leaf litter on the forest floor. All were young, appearing to be in pristine condition, and we picked just enough for a garnish on the whole chicken from the Ithaca Farmers’ Market that we planned to roast later that evening.
It was only when we returned home and emptied our backpack to clean the mushrooms that we realized we were not the first to have discovered their presence. Upon slicing the stems, we noticed they were unusually pithy, even on the smallest and freshest mushrooms. Our friend noticed a couple of maggots inside one stem, which he squished and discarded. Just like the epiphany of stumbling upon the porcini patch, which began as one mushroom and quickly turned into 50, the first couple maggots soon became hundreds, burrowing their way up the stems of each porcini. After such a dry summer, the maggots must have been just as happy as I was to find a good meal. They are more discriminating than I would have imagined, though – even the edible, though inferior, nearby bay boletes (Boletus badius) were spared.
Luckily, the maggots had not yet completed their pilgrimage to the most succulent part of the porcini – the cap. After thoroughly cleaning them, which meant slicing off all but one of the stems in their entirety and brushing off the caps with a damp towel (but not rinsing), our bounty looked much smaller. Still, we had enough left for Jenna to make a stellar white wine, lemon, maple syrup and porcini broth for the roasted chicken. I will try my newfound porcini spot again periodically in between now and the frost. While the season’s first porcinis are always exciting, the later ones are much less likely to be infested with maggots!
