Gourmet Foragers Reap a Wild Bounty

It was the tail end of morel season and the black flies were out, but Robert Fuller wanted to check a patch of woods, just in case.

With a knife in hand and a woven-wood basket strapped to his arm, Fuller crept among old maples and overgrown stone walls on a Vermont hillside. He stepped carefully amid matted brown leaves and tender green ferns. Then he stopped abruptly.

“This feels like the right kind of habitat,” he said, surveying a sandy, mossy spot below an opening in the canopy. “It’s like a sixth sense.”

Seconds later he spotted three hefty morels, spongy and copper-colored. Then others appeared: One cluster was a few feet away, another hid beneath a fern.

It’s the kind of discovery that can drive foragers into a frenzy. Fuller, a chef in Burlington, was noticeably stirred.

“This is the most morels I’ve seen since I’ve been in Vermont,” he said.

Fuller is part of a quiet subculture of modern-day gatherers who scour America’s fields and forests for wild edibles. Where others see only leaves and sticks, they find vegetative treasures: mushrooms, mint, ginseng, berries.

Some forage purely for pleasure, others for profit. Nearly all seem to share an enthusiasm not just for the bounty secured but for the thrill of the hunt.

“When you find a lot of morels, you jump up and down,” said Robert Resnik, treasurer of the Vermont Mycology Assn. “Black trumpets make me just go crazy.”

He and other members of his local mushroom hunting group hold outings every other Sunday in the summer.

Resnik, a musician and a director of the Fletcher Free Library, recalled how magical it was when he made his first big find of morels. Returning to Burlington from a mushroom hunt in Benson, he and his friends decided to make another stop.

“We couldn’t bear to go inside because we’d had such a magical day,” he said. “We walked almost as if we were being drawn by an invisible arm . . . over a stream, walked up to a huge elm.”

There they found so many morels he had to take his shirt off to carry them.

Successful hunts are the payoff for learning where and when to find the best wild plants and mushrooms while avoiding the poisonous ones, such as the death cap and other amanita mushrooms.

“People are scared of it, and rightfully so. You can really get into trouble,” said Resnik, who has been foraging for 14 years and has read about 100 books on mushrooms.

Despite the dangers, foraging can yield an enticing harvest of flavors, smells and textures.

Nova Kim and her partner, Leslie Hook, get about 85% of their food and 90% of their medicine from the wild.

“Your food is your medicine, and your medicine is your food,” Kim said.

Strapping baskets onto their backs one recent day, they scaled a steep hill near a lake in Woodbury. Within 30 feet, Kim and Hook uprooted tender wild leeks before they had blossomed; jewelweed or touch-me-not, whose leaves soothe bug bites; and a wild horseradish with a strongly spicy root.

“This is the neighborhood convenience store,” Kim said, adding that other, even more productive spots are like a gourmet supermarket.

She and Hook make a living selling medicinal and edible mushrooms and plants under the business names of Vermont Native and Nature’s Own. They collect 138 mushroom varieties throughout the year, selling some fresh and drying others for sale during the winter. Earlier this day, they sold 21 pounds of pheasant back mushrooms to the Old Tavern at Grafton.

“The great thing is she’ll be bringing things in until it’s cold,” said Tom Bivins, the inn’s executive chef. “In the winter, she brings in the best dried mushrooms I’ve ever gotten.”

Now he uses her wild mint, bamboo and watercress.

“I introduce it to my guests, and they learn something about wild edibles,” he said.

The couple share their knowledge by teaching classes in plant identification. Like most serious foragers, however, they are elusive about where to find prized plants.

“You never tell them where your ginseng beds are or where your morel patches are,” Kim said.

Once converted to the pleasures of wild edibles, they said, people stay on the lookout during every hike, walk or bike ride.

Fuller introduced foraging to his wife, and now she has a keener eye than he does, he said. After his recent expedition in the woods, he was eager to show her his haul, thinking she’d be envious.

“That’s a good day of foraging right there,” he said, scanning his basket of wild leeks and pheasant back and morel mushrooms.

Fuller, who runs Leunig’s Bistro in Burlington and Pauline’s restaurant in South Burlington, brings a chef’s appreciation to the woods.

He marvels at pheasant backs, which smell like watermelon when cut open. In spring, he gathers or buys leeks, also called ramps, and serves them in his restaurants, brushed with olive oil and grilled.

In summer he is partial to Grifola frondosa, also called maitake or hen of the woods. “I love the flavor,” he said. “It comes back to the same tree for several years. I picked one that weighed 46 pounds.”

His real passion are the boletes that Italians call porcini and the French call cepes. Arriving in the fall with the chanterelles, they are what enticed Fuller into the woods in the first place.

“Once I found them, I started to look more and had some pretty incredible foraging . . . so I made wider and wider circles,” Fuller said. “That really got me going on wild mushrooms.”

Resnik cultivated his interest closer to home, prowling around Burlington when he didn’t have a car.

He has identified 75 wild mushrooms in Vermont’s largest city, including morels and black trumpet mushrooms lurking behind abandoned houses or in parks. He knows where to find mulberry bushes, black walnut trees, burdock, sour cherries and sweet black raspberries--and he hasn’t had to roam much farther than his neighborhood.

“There are wild edibles everywhere,” Resnik said.