Living: A Boom in Mushrooms

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The once lowly Morchella is a culinary Cinderella

The prisoner on death row was asked what he would like for his last meal. "A wild-mushroom omelet," he said. "I never had the courage to try one before."

Like the condemned man of the anecdote, most Americans still recoil instinctively from any kind of mushroom that is not snow white, cellophane wrapped and supermarket sanitized. In the past few years, however, the succulent edible fungi that grow wild for the picking in almost every part of the country have found ever increasing acceptance in restaurant and home menus. At Dean & DeLuca, a Manhattan gourmet emporium that sells up to 100 Ibs. of fresh domestic wild mushrooms a week, Produce Purchasing Manager Lee Grimsbo notes, "People are beginning to think of them as a cooking item rather than something exotic." Patrick Terrail, owner of Hollywood's Ma Maison restaurant, had been importing dried mushrooms before he discovered that fresh morels, chanterelles, cepes and other varieties can all be found in the U.S. Says Terrail: "Mushrooms are just beginning to become a craze."

None of this is news to folks in Midwestern and Western states, where the wild fungus, once derided as a "toadstool," is hunted with passion. Last week the season for morels, considered by many connoisseurs to be the tastiest of all, was coming to its peak in Mesick, Mich. (pop. 373), which calls itself "the Mushroom Capital" and counts among its landmarks the Mushroom Cap Motel and the Mush-Room Bar; despite heavy rain, a 30-minute parade swept Miss Mesick Mushroom and her court to fungoid fame.

Entrants in the contest for the largest morel came from as far away as South Carolina. The sport is often known as "rooming" or "shrooming"; one ace picker is Jim Goodwin, 45, a construction worker from West Liberty, Ohio, who snapped up 150 morels in a few hours. A novice might be wary of the poisonous cap. However, experts say that Morchella esculenta or the five or six other varieties of the most sought after morels can be clearly identified by their pitted, spongy caps and attached hollow stems. Chilly weather this spring has driven morel prices to $12.50 per Ib.

Dana Shaler, who has won several contests, offers his services as a guide to would-be mushroom hunters. He can get $200 for a day and a half in the woods, plus a $100 bonus if the pickings are good. More and more city slickers are joining mycological societies in order to stalk their own wild mushrooms with experts.

There are almost as many ways to cook morels as there are toadstools in the forest. In Mesick and other Midwestern towns, people simply dip them in flour or cracker crumbs and fry them. Many restaurants, like Manhattan's Four Seasons and Le Français, in Wheeling, Ill., use them as garnishes for meat and game or in a cream sauce. Owner-Author George Lang of Manhattan's Cafe des Artistes insists on serving them as a separate course sauteed in olive oil or butter: "They are too precious to use as a vegetable."