Poland and Mushrooms pt 1

I was standing in the middle of my kitchen, five stories up from Kaukaska Street in the monotonous Stegny neighborhood of Warsaw. I opened up the jar and held it up to my eye, examining the gooey maślaki mushrooms inside. A sour earthy smell came out and invigorated my senses with its pungent punch. I stuck my spoon inside and slid the slimy morsels out one by one into a small glass. Each one dripped out, splashed onto the enameled glass, and then sat there entombed in the transparent slime. I looked closely again at the alien looking creatures that had alternating smooth brown and porous cream-colored surfaces. The longer I looked, the more my fascination grew. But they were there for me to eat, and not to admire, and soon they exited from there interim resting place and into my mouth, and finally into my gut, where maybe they would sprout again.

100 kilometers north of Warsaw, on the cusp of autumn, I found myself in a small village near a town called Pułtusk. Here I was going to do something very Polish, very Slavic for that matter, in nature with my companion and life partner, Kasia. We were walking along the river Narew, a river that flows into the Wisła, which in turn then flows through the home of Kopernik’s Toruń, and out the mouth of Günter Grass’ Gdańsk into the Baltic Sea. We were on our way to pick some mushrooms, specifically kurki. Soon we broke off from the river and headed towards the wooded flatland. The idea was that later we would fry these mushrooms and eat them alone with spices, or mix them with scrambled eggs, and in my impressionable eyes this was a truly Slavic meal.  

While on this adventure, I remembered a scene that never left me from a Russian film named The Cuckoo. Two soldiers, a Finn and a Russian, have been betrayed by their countries; one left to die, and the other being taken to his trial. When things go wrong they’re both saved by an endearing Sami woman in the wilderness of northern Finland. The problem is that all three of them speak completely different languages, and so in communication there is no common understanding. This especially isn’t good when you're staring into the eyes of the enemy you’ve been fighting for the past 3 years. Things are tense, but they manage not to kill each other, mostly due to the pacifism of the Finn.

The scene I was thinking about happens when they're all doing different things, and you see the Russian picking something in the woods. He comes back home with a bucket full of gigantic dirt-encrusted mushrooms.

When the Sami woman sees him she says,

 “Don’t eat mushrooms or you’ll go loony.”

He responds,

“Don’t worry. I’ll cook them. The sergeant in my battalion cooked them wonderfully!”

Later he runs up to her with a boiling pot in his hand.

“Ma’am I need salt. Salt. Where is it?”

“I’m not mad enough to eat mushrooms” She waves her hand in a suggestion to go throw them out.

He thinks she’s pointing to the direction of the salt,

“In the house,” he says. “Ok I’ll go get it.”

Later they are speaking together.

“The mushrooms will be ready soon. We can eat. But we need some salt.”

“Yes,” she looks at him warily. “Mushrooms are bad. They can be poisonous.”

The next day he wakes up to find her standing over him. She looks worried and says,

“Do you feel bad? It must be the mushrooms. I’ll feed you some infusion and flush it out of you.”

He is completely expressionless and looks fine. She brings him some infusion soup that acts as a laxative, and he politely accepts her offer, thinking it’s just plain soup. Soon after he is ejecting everything from his rear end, and cursing the Sami woman to hell. The Finn walks outside, watches this spectacle and says,

“That’s what happens when you eat too many mushrooms.”

Despite its humor, this can be seen as a good example for understanding the relationship that Slavs have to their mushrooms. Through their utter lack of communication we find that what stands out in the Russian's mind is his mushroom culture, and what stands out in the others is their traditional misconceptions. 

I thought about this scene in Poland, far away (but not too far) from its Slavic cousin Russia. Would our fate be similar to that of the Russian? No, we had a common language and therefore there would be no misunderstanding. I asked Kasia cautiously,

“Do you know which ones are poisonous?”  

Her curt sardonic answer came reassuringly, “Of course!”

We circled the forest and scoured the soil, spying for the effervescent yellow prince’s crowns, but after an hour of not finding a sign of existence we went back home empty-handed. Apparently the weather had been too dry lately. All was not lost though, because as soon as we arrived at the cabin we were greeted by a whole clan of bulbous opieńki waiting patiently on a cut tree by the fence that wrapped around the corner of the house. Unfortunately though these wouldn’t be fried, and instead they would be pickled and kept in a jar, like the alien maślaki that sprouted up into their second life in my stomach.


Read part two here