My European correspondents have clued me in to the mystery of the "lost fungi" of 2010. They have turned up in record numbers in Italy, German and Norway!
News articles from Italian and British papers (the Guardian among them) tell of some twenty mushroom pickers in Italy who have perished while on the hunt, but not from eating poisonous ones; no far stupider than that--from falling off cliffs and slippery slopes while prowling in the dark with miners lights trying to outsmart each other. Apparently this years bumper crop has encouraged more "amateurs" to seek out the prized boletes.
My friend Jim recently reports having a great meal at a restaurant in Weimar Germany where a generous helping of steinpilz (boletes to us) garnished the rack of lamb. The chef, pleased to hear of their delight, invited them into the kitchen where he displayed some 30 pounds of perfect specimens JUST GATHERED THAT MORNING IN THE LOCAL WOODS!!
And yesterday, in Oslo, in their local woods, my friends retrieved a bounty of various species (see picture above) All this makes me insanely jealous of course.
So all the summer mushrooms of Connecticut seem to have migrated to the old country.
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