The Big Chanterelle Myth

It’s been a good year, an amazing year. At least, so I was told.
2009 was the year when you couldn’t help but stumble upon chanterelles in the Swedish forest. They were EVERYWHERE. No exaggeration. Even if you didn’t try to pick them you seemed to come home with pockets full of them, simply by passing through a bit of nature. ‘Greta just popped out, and lo and behold, five litres of chanterelles while picking up the newspaper from the letterbox in the morning. ‘. Amazing. ‘Janne goes out every afternoon and scoops up more than he can eat and bring to work for charitable distribution’. Unheard of. No one gives away litres of chanterelles unless they are some other look-a-like but seriously poisonous fungi found in the moss.

So to put it mildly, my expectations in the chanterelle department of success was, as far as I was concerned, a given. It was more a question of HOW many amazing litres would I be able to brag about once I came out of the woods alive after my fungal expedition. Well, my chanterelle glee soon enough turned to chanterelle desperation, before finally settling on chanterelle failure. I found one. Not two, but one. And I covered the geographical landmass of an average county. Either they were all hiding from my terribly untrained eye or as my mother gently remarked: ‘someone must have cleared this place before you’. Sure, had it been the size of an average city park. Sure. But I’m talking an area the size of Tasmania. SURELY ‘someone’ couldn’t have cleared it all before me. And aren’t they meant to grow back?! And I have to admit, that single one I found was so pathetically small that any chanterelle picker worth their woven basket would have left it to grow. But hell, I couldn’t come back completely empty handed. The shame would have been unbearable.

So my theory is that the chanterelle myth strongly resembles the fish myth, you know the one that got away? Because, seriously, has anyone ever seen these 8 gazillion litres of chanterelles that people seem to effortlessly amass? Do you actually confront someone after they told their proud and happy forest story and insist on being shown the freezer box in the basement just to verify the truth factor? That kind of behaviour results in less Christmas cards. No one likes to be doubted, especially not in the chanterelly kind of way. So you just say ‘wow, that’s amazing’ and then the story is legitimate. It’s the truth, at least as far as you’ve been told. No proof shown, no proof needed.

Still, my single premature chanterelle teamed up with a small bunch of other chanterelle misfits and became a little taste sensation of a nibble before dinner. Butter, salt, white pepper and onion. And of course that rare species of a thing called chanterelle. Together they made my day, the delicacy of rarity is a fine thing to taste. And as I’ve always said, ‘better one chanterelle on the fork than six litres unpicked in the forest’.