Conference turris::scandia

349.0. "Mushrooms anyone?" by TLE::SAVAGE (Neil, @Spit Brook) Mon Jul 31 1989 13:54

Group soc.culture.nordic
article 548

From: [email protected] (Dexter Kozen)
Subject: Re: Picking mushrooms...
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY

In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Jonas Flygare) writes:
>Here's a question to all you american people..
>In Sweden, Norway and Finland (and I presume Denmark as well)
>during the fall, people seem to get contract a strange disease causing
>them to wander off into the forest, and return a couple of hours later
>with a silly grin on their face, and a basket, or bag, or even several
>bags full of mushrooms. (note: there are in fact _several_ different
>mushrooms, only most americans I've met seem to divide them into
>two categories; toadstools, which grow outdoors, and are poisonous, and
>the regular mushroom, which grows in little boxes inside delicatessen
>stores, or hibernates in small tin cans.. ;-)       

    The year I lived in Denmark, I once got dragged off to Mols, a
    picturesque peninsula east of Aarhus, on a "svampejagt" (mushroom
    quest).  About 15 of us trudged through the Danish countryside for a
    couple of hours filling baskets with a wide variety of bizarre
    specimens, most of which were of the kind my mother warned me never to
    touch or I'd get warts.  Then we returned to my friend's summer house
    for a feast.  I particularly remember one variety that looked like
    someone's gall bladder and when cooked gave off a thick putrid slime
    reminiscent of slug secretions.  
    
    I bravely sampled these delicacies but found them mostly inedible, at
    least to my unsophisticated palate. I'm not sure the Danes really liked
    them either, although they didn't let on.  As the evening set in, we
    sat around the table with the light hanging cozily low over it,
    laughing and washing down the fungi with beer and homemade snaps.  I
    soon realized that the whole adventure was just an excuse to get
    together and enjoy the company of friends.