Culture : Europe Savors Its Annual Fall Mushroom Quest : * The rite of passage to winter inspires fungi forays and gourmet dishes. The rewards outweigh the risks.

It was just after dawn on an October morning in the Montmorency Forest north of Paris. The stands of oak and chestnut trees were still shrouded in mist. Earthy, pungent vapors rose from the ferns and soft humus on the forest floor.

Suddenly a man in tie and business suit, his trouser legs rolled up to his knees, burst into the open from a narrow trail. Startled by a stranger on his dawn mission, he held up a wicker basket by way of explanation.

“If you don’t get here early,” he said, pointing to his harvest of several large mushrooms, each with thick stems and golden brown caps the size of hamburger buns, “they will all be gone. On the weekend this forest will be like the Champs Elysees.”

The mushrooms in the man’s basket were cepes . In England they are sometimes known as “penny buns” because of their distinctive toasted-bun-looking caps. Italians, the western world’s most prodigious mushroom consumers, treasure them under the name porcini and eat them with practically every dish, including raw in salads. German mushroom hunters call them steinpilz , which means “stone mushroom.”

Known universally by the Latin name boletus edulis , they are probably the most pursued, cooked and savored wild mushrooms on Earth. In late September and October the European woods are full of mushroom hunters collecting these and a dozen other edible wild mushroom varieties that pop up under the moist leaf cover in the early autumn months.

The annual fall mushroom quest is one of the last outdoor rites before winter envelops the Continent in its sepulchral gloom. Markets display trays of the bulky cepes ; egg-yolk colored chanterelles; gnarled, cream-colored “goat-foot” mushrooms; saffron milk caps, and the delicate, black, horn-shaped mushrooms the French call “trumpet of the dead” but which are delicious and not at all deadly.

Provincial hotels offer special mushroom-hunting weekends that include guided sorties into the woods with fungi specialists and meals featuring the mushrooms harvested by the guests. The grand chefs of France and Switzerland negotiate with mushroom brokers in the fungi-rich regions of Perigord and Auvergne for special deliveries of 27 varieties of wild mushrooms for their creations. Some chefs demand that their mushrooms come from a specific forest where they feel the soil and climate conspire to give the mushroom its best flavor.

Each year about this time, for example, Manuel Martinez, chef of the Tour d’Argent restaurant in Paris offers a fricassee of three types of fresh wild mushrooms-- cepes , girolles (chanterelles) and faux mousserons --served with pan-fried goose liver and ginger bread. Bofingers, a brasserie for the after-theater crowd, serves minced pheasant with goat-foot mushrooms, pleurotes (oyster fungus) and “trumpets of the dead.”

It is the time of year when pharmacists in France and other Western European countries put up posters in their windows displaying edible and poisonous mushrooms. French pharmacists are required by law to know how to identify all the main varieties of edible and poisonous mushrooms, such as the deadly greenish-yellow capped amanite phalloide or “death cap.”

Despite national campaigns warning citizens about the dangers of mushroom poisoning, inevitably dozens of people die each year from consuming such deadly varieties as the death cap or “destroying angels” ( amanita virosa) . Other mushrooms cause severe diarrhea, vomiting and hallucinations.

One mushroom is not poisonous but simply embarrassing: It causes its consumer’s face to turn beet-red if he or she has consumed alcohol two days before or after eating the mushroom.

Pollution and environmental disasters such as the Soviet Unions’ 1986 radiation leak in Chernobyl have added to the mushroom dangers. In Germany, the National Nutrition Information Center in Bonn recently discontinued publication of a wild mushroom guide because of the increasing dangers of mushroom gathering.

In addition to accumulation of radiation from Chernobyl and heavy metals from cars and industry in the highly absorbent mushrooms, nutrition center spokesman Ruediger Lobitz said the mushroom hunters themselves cause a threat to the environment by tromping through the woods destroying every fungus in sight. “They even destroy the poisonous varieties,” Lobitz complained. Publishing a mushroom guide, he explained, simply encourages more people to go into the woods.

But despite dangers old and new, mushroom appreciation societies in France, Germany and Britain report more people than ever in the European woods looking for some of the several hundred edible mushrooms. On a recent guided foray into the woods of the Haute Loire region of Auvergne, a group of American tourists in two days collected 108 varieties of fungi.

“Twenty years ago almost no one came here looking for mushrooms,” said Andre Fromant, 41, a sculptor from the Haute Loire village of Lantriac who supplements his income by working as a mushroom guide in the fall and a ski patrolman in the winter. “The few who came were looking for the three predictable types--the cepes , morilles (a black, honeycombed spring-season mushroom) and mousserons. Now people are more sophisticated, more willing to try new types.”

The increase in demand for wild mushrooms, primarily in Italy and France, has caused some of the depressed local economies of the mountainous Massif Central region to mushroom.

The tiny mountain-valley town of St. Alyre d’Arlanc, for example, situated north of Le Puy in the Livradois Regional Forest, once had seven sawmills to support its population. But when the timber industry declined it discovered a new title: “Wild mushroom capital of France.”

Two of the country’s largest wild mushroom wholesalers operate in the one-hotel town of 220 inhabitants nestled in the tall pines of the forest. Some of the wild mushrooms come from local residents who supplement their incomes by scouring the woods for edible fungi.

On a recent Sunday, George Fargette, 62, showed up at the warehouse of Champivradois, one of the big wholesalers, with his basket containing a little over two pounds of cepes . “I’m just a Sunday searcher,” he explained as he waited for the 31 francs--$5--he would be paid for his morning harvest.

But most of the wild mushrooms arrive at the St. Alyre warehouse in trucks from other collection points in France and Europe. Increasingly over the past five years, the heavily wooded Eastern European countries of Yugoslavia and Romania have become major sources of wild mushrooms. Even the United States, where the forests are rich in fungi but the wild mushroom market is still very poor, is a large supplier.

“Last year we imported 40 tons of morilles , trompette des morts and girolles (chanterelles) from Oregon and California,” said Champivradois executive Jean-Pierre Trapon. “The American girolles are very big, and our clientele prefer them.”

In a relatively short time since it left the timber trade and became a mushroom center, St. Alyre has become a bustling world distribution point for the two dozen internationally marketed wild mushrooms. Orders from the famous chefs are treated separately. An employee is assigned to hand-pick choice specimens for the chefs and they are transported to Paris or Lyon in special refrigerated cars.

But the rest of the wild mushroom trade is a big-volume affair in which some cepes travel all the way to the center of France from Serbia and are then re-exported under a French label to Germany or Italy.

“There’s a truck that just came in from Coreze (a mushroom-rich area in Southwest France),” said Trapon as he walked with a visitor in a parking lot full of refrigerated trucks bearing the mushroom company’s logo. Inside a glass-walled office, his wife, Joelle Bravard-Trapon, was on the phone getting wild mushroom price quotations from Belgrade and New York.

“I’m waiting for a truck from Germany,” continued Trapon, intent on showing the international nature of his mushroom affair. “This evening I deliver to Belgium and Switzerland.”

But for millions of French, Germans and Italians, the annual fall mushroom hunt is a more personal matter: briskly walking in the misty woods, stooping under the bowing branches of evergreens to find the biggest cepes , and loading wicker baskets with fungi to be served for dinner later in the day.

For some of the most passionate French, in fact, the mushroom season is a magic, romantic time that inspires sculpture and poetry like this one from artist and mushroom seeker Fromant:

Coming from a forgotten spore

You, here, stained with Bacchic dreams

A dreamy opening to the Divine

I drink you deeply with my eyes, the living wine of your being . . . .