When one hears of a semester abroad experience involving someone buying some “sweet ass mushrooms”, it is natural to imagine stoned Americans in Amsterdam falling into canals and doing wildly inappropriate things in the Anne Frank house. But actually I am talking about the less fun but more delicious edible mushrooms.
Fabulous mushrooms here are dirt-cheap! The cheapest is chanterelles, which at whole foods (I mention whole foods not as the basis for any rational price but just because Path-mark and the Piggly Wiggly tend not to sell the worlds finest chanterelles) in America sell for about $20-$25 a pound, but here they are 10-15 euros per kilogram! Okay so that means nothing to a lot of you who both hate the metric system, the European union and mushrooms without psilocybin, but that’s about a quarter of the price. Also, you can by fresh porcini, black trumpet and blue mushrooms here for about half the price.
Mushrooms were about the only thing that grew in ex-soviet countries during the communist era that weren’t some how socialized. Of course, when Borya and Vika aren’t drinking straight sterno and watching their democracies disappear, they are happily foraging for mushrooms and selling them to the French and Italians to make into great cuisine and to the British to boil them into a fine snot (anyone reading this who has had breakfast in the dorms of University of Edinburgh will understand how the Scots can take an innocent mushroom and make it look like an alien fetus). So, in a rare bit of news something is truly cheaper here than in the states.
Basically, when I come back from France and hand you a kwanza present that is brown, mushy and smells like the forest, you’ll know what it is…
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