Oct. 30, 2013 11:14 p.m. ET
Estonians love to go hunting for wild mushrooms every autumn. But most would never think of divulging their favorite foraging spots. WSJ’s Liis Kängsepp reports.
AEGVIIDU, Estonia—Don’t let Angeelika Kang fool you. She has built a reputation as the Baltic answer to Martha Stewart with her willingness to show amateur bakers how to whip up camera-ready cakes. She shares her best recipes in popular Estonian cookbooks. But there are deep secrets she isn’t going to divulge, like how she finds her wild mushrooms.
Ms. Kang, 42 years old, is passionate about one of the nation’s treasured pastimes: preserving dewberries, tomatoes, cucumbers and other edible items that can be freely gathered from Estonia’s forests. Gathering wild stuff is very big in the northern countries and Scandinavia.
But don’t ask Ms. Kang for inside information on the best place to find the most prized of the produce on her shelves—particularly mushrooms. You’ll be plum out of luck.
Like many others in the northern reaches of Europe, Estonians consider their private haunts sacred ground. Asked where to track down wild chanterelles, for instance, Ms. Kang is apt to say, “Take a left from the main road there, turn right at the tree and then left again.”
As a child, Eero Endjärv hunted for berries and mushrooms in a forest that skirted a Soviet army test site. Ellen Jervell/The Wall Street Journal
She admits, that is a lie. “You will never find the right spot.”
This year’s mushroom harvest is on the wane, but fear that the activity’s deepest secrets aren’t safe is always in season. The threats come in many forms, from curious kinfolk wanting to participate in a family ritual to well-meaning amateurs looking for advice.
Kersti Rea, an Estonian entrepreneur, has been going to the forest ever since she was a child, and her spots for finding orange milk-cap mushrooms are an inheritance from her father. She says she might tell her closest friends, but usually she, too, just gives vague directions. Ms. Rea says that finding mushrooms is a knack akin to witchcraft. They are a presence some folks can feel in the air.
Ms. Rea admits this kind of secrecy has also kept her from expanding her mushroom fields. For instance, she routinely asked the elderly neighbor living next to her summer cottage to take her to his special spot for chanterelles, but he “always sneaked his way out of showing the spots.”
Mr. Endjärv found a mushroom on a recent hunt he hadn’t seen before. Ellen Jervell/The Wall Street Journal
Estonia’s liberal right-to-roam laws give anyone unfettered access to most of nature, but mushroom patches can be few and far between, meaning prospective pickers can search for days with little success.
Ms. Rea is no better than her neighbor, though. She recently refused to take a family friend on a search for saffron milk-caps (or Lactarius deliciosus) and “you could really see from his face that he felt insulted.”
She didn’t care. “This is pure human jealousy,” Ms. Rea said. “If I tell others my special spots, they might pick all my mushrooms…it’s my jackpot waiting in the forest.”
Not everyone in Northern Europe is so stingy. The Finnish Forest Institute will set to work next year creating maps for Finns who don’t know the craft. Researchers have been gathering data for decades, and one of the experts on the project, Salo Kauko, said the maps should be in service within 15 months.
Amanita muscaria Liis Kangsepp for The Wall Stree
Those looking for a piece of the jackpot will likely simply find frustration. Viktoria Korpan, an editor at a Russian-language newspaper in Estonia, decided to ask about mushroom-picking conditions and cloudberry locations on Facebook, only to be given many vague directions to places that don’t exist.
“I once asked my relatives the same questions,” one of her Facebook pals said in response to the post. “They looked at me as if I were a serial killer.”
Families across the Nordics and Baltics have passed down specific details about hunting grounds from generation to generation.
Aare Martinson, a 56-year-old biologist living on the Estonian island of Saaremaa, isn’t ready for that step yet. He first found his family’s location 30 years ago after his grandmother had abandoned the hunt because of fatigue. Mr. Martinson soldiered on, finding a small clearing in the brush completely overgrown by lush and edible mushrooms.
When asked if the local rumors that he is keeping the spot a secret from his own daughters are true, Mr. Martinson declined to give a specific answer. But then said, “it’s not like I’m telling people how to find the place.”
Mr. Martinson, who navigates his way through the forest “tree by tree,” takes solace in this: “If you don’t know about [my] place, it’s not like you’re going to end up there by accident.”
Even if novices find a spot, they still need advice on what to look for once they are there. Teele Jairus, a mycologist studying fungi, estimates there are between 200 and 300 edible mushroom species in Estonia, but it is easy for an untrained eye to make a deadly mistake, “When a mushroom looks nice and people are tempted to bite in straight away,” she says. (Amanita muscaria, or the fly amanita, is one to avoid.) But having a healthy dose of suspicion is the best policy, she says.
There is plenty of folk wisdom about how to tell an edible mushroom from a poisonous one. One bogus rule of thumb is “a poisonous mushroom will tarnish a silver spoon.” Another says “if it bruises blue, it’s poisonous.” According to the Missouri Department of Conservation, “there is no test to determine edible versus poisonous mushrooms.” The only way to know is to develop understanding of what you are actually looking at, by using an expert or an authoritative picture book.
Even in Estonia, there are a few guides willing to spill their secrets. Eero Endjärv, a 40-year-old architect, spent his summers at his grandparents’ house located in a forest that skirted a Soviet army test site. Because it was a no-go zone, he and his friends would sneak through wild gardens, on the lookout for berries and mushrooms as bullets sometimes flew overhead.
Decades later, his red Jeep Cherokee is always packed with hiking boots, a pocketknife, mushroom guides and big plastic bags, and it always has an open seat for beginners. His spots “are usually further away from roads and more difficult to reach,” he says.
Most fond of the parasol mushroom, he relies on a wealth of experience to fill sacks full of black trumpets, gypsies, brittle-gills and other species he is fond of. “Morels grow near aspen trees, so I usually check the aero maps of Estonia to find aspen trees and go there,” he says.
—Sven Grundberg and Juris Kaza contributed to this article.
Here is the original post: Where’s Your Mushroom Plot? Don’t Even Ask an Estonian
