Gina Rae La Cerva’s great-grandmother grew up in a schetyl, or small forest village in what is today Poland. That village no longer exists. But, La Cerva travelled by train to the area where it once was. It’s a journey that takes her back in time to come to know a woman whom she knows little about.
Gina Rae La Cerva Recounts Mushroom Foraging in Her Book, Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food
My great-grandmother Esther’s home was destroyed by war. The only pictures I have ever seen of here is in a carved frame in my mother’s house. The photo is from her wedding day. She wears a delicate tiara on top of a simple veil, the white gauze spilling over her thick hair, which has been woven into intricate braids on either side of her head. She has thick, close-set eyebrows, and dark, heavy-lidded eyes. Her thin lips turn down into a slight frown. I do not know if she was in love with the man she has just married. Her resigned expression seems to embody the Hebrew saying, If there’s doubt, there’s no doubt.
I imagine the contours of Esther’s childhood.
Meals Through the Seasons
Spring was for nettle soup and linden-flower tea.
In May, when the poppies bloomed, the villagers crushed the seeds to make oil or cooked them into gruel. With hands dusted in pollen, they boiled poppy petals with dark honey from the wild bees found in the cavities of trees, and made a thick syrup for young children with coughs and colds who could not get to sleep.
In late summer, at reaping time, the last sheaf of wheat brought down by the last threshing stroke was adorned with flowers, tied with ribbons, and carried through the village on the last harvest-wagon.
The fall was busy with the gathering of berries and dead wood before winter set in, and it became so cold even the quick-silver froze.
Mushrooms Thrive in the Fall
And of course, all throughout the year, but most abundant in early fall, on nearly every stump and base, the fruiting bodies of mushrooms, each with a name like poetry: bare-toothed russula (handsome and white-stemmed, along the forest floor), copper brittlegills, yellow-cracking boletes, cloudy clitocybe, and sandy knight caps (purple-topped and sprouting from rotting logs); sulfur tuft, scaber stalks, and horse mushrooms (large and sessile, glossy and red); king boletes, bay boletes, brown birch, and pestle-shagged puffballs (growing from the sides of a standing giant); wooly milk caps, orange slime cort, and parasols. Each with their own dark smell, like the musk of an animal. To procreate, these mushrooms released their invisible spores into the air, musty rich explosions, winging on the wind, buoyant and weightless, like silent wishes for a prosperous future.
The villagers ate fresh mushrooms, and dried and pickled and stored even more, holding on to them like treasure for uncertain times ahead.
How Food Relates Back to Community
All told, these forest rituals and traditions bound together a culture that was always under siege. A way to map a forest of invasions and retreats, where boundary lines were only ever a mirage. The armies and borders may have moved, but the people and their loyalties remained in place. They were from here.
Did Esther stand at the edge of the pasture, gazing at a red deer disappearing into the woods, its elegant rack melting into the tall grass, and think of escaping somewhere else? Perhaps she pocketed the gloomy tips of spruce when she was meant to be gathering firewood, or couldn’t stop herself from eating the miraculous blueberries she was supposed to collect. I imagine she picked the swollen white stems of borowiki mushrooms with purple-stained fingers, each movement a small revolt. Perhaps she lived her life according to the Russian/Polish proverb: Ciszej jedziesz, dalej będziesz – “One can go further if they remain quiet.”
Excerpted from the book Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food, by Gina Rae La Cerva, with permission of the publisher, Greystone Books.
Words by Gina Rae La Cerva
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