Poles Apart

The FameWorks were in Poland a couple of weeks ago, and our investigation took us, via a lengthy train journey, to deepest Pomerania.  Rolling sedately along single tracks through verdant fields and endless stretches of golden forest, the late sun’s oblique rays delicately penetrated a million dappling autumnal leaves,  bringing a last little warmth to the moist dark humus below, giving forth a bounty of mushrooms.

Or to be specific, Kania, Maślak, Kurka, Pieczarka, Rydz, Borowik (or Prawdziwek), Podgrzybek,  and any number of others, for Poles rarely if ever refer simply to mushrooms; they all know the correct specific names for at least a few dozen.  If the Eskimos have 50 words for snow, the Poles will give them a good run for their money on fungi.

There seems to be something going on with mushrooms and the Polish collective soul.  Pan Tadeusz is the 19th Century epic poem that is compulsory reading for all Polish secondary school students.    Mushrooms figure prominently in the story, and with more than a hint of erotic promise…

Of mushrooms there were plenty: the lads gathered the fair-cheeked fox-mushrooms, so famous in the Lithuanian songs as the emblem of maidenhood, for the worms do not eat them, and, marvellous to say, no insect alights on them; the young ladies hunted for the slender pine-lover, which the song calls the colonel of the mushrooms. All were eager for the orange-agaric; this, though of more modest stature and less famous in song, is still the most delicious, whether fresh or salted, whether in autumn or in winter.

What can be behind this national obsession with matters mycophagic?  

Poles explain that the act of acquiring is at least as important as that of eating.  Foraging for these magic packets of texture and flavour by necessity requires a trip into the woods - often, in practise,  made in a jolly family group.  And all trips into the woods come dripping with metaphor, as characters from Little Red Riding Hood to Avatar’s Jake Sully would attest; they promise danger, challenge and ultimately transformation to a better, heroic self.  

When it comes to mushrooms, the danger is literal: the  tasty gołąbek mushroom, great for a hearty family meal of cabbage rolls, looks pretty similar to the muchomor sromotnikowy, one of which would kill them all.  Not for nothing is it sometimes referred to as Szatan.

Polish anthropologist Roch Sulima  talks of mushroom foraging as a primal activity – a process of unmediated connection with something mysterious and spiritual.  And perhaps in the context of a country so often throughout its history encroached upon by powerful military neighbours, mushroom foraging as a universal activity figures a kind of collective taking of ownership of the land. 

One might argue that all great national foodstuffs – in their origins and production - reveal a deeper meaning about the essential character and quest of their nation.  France’s love affair with cheese reflects the glorious manifold treasures of a hundred distinct terroirs,  from the Cabécou of the High Pyrenees where the feisty goats do their capricious thing among the granite outcrops, to the sensuously fondant Camembert of Normandy where the cows are round, docile and lowing.  French cheesemaking embodies refinement and craft - an imposition of form, order and reason on the dissolute, liquid indiscipline of milk.

China’s centuries long relationship with pork echoes a richly fertile, yet perennially vulnerable land, at once nourished and scourged by the great flooding rivers.  In this context, where prudence and foresight must reign, pork speaks of virtuous frugality and thrift (for a pig’s own diet is the waste of humans, whilst there’s no part of the pig itself that’s wasted) combined with silky,  fatty indulgence and pleasure for the whole family.   

Sashimi speaks eloquently of Japan; not only its geographical realities – it’s a small country with limited arable land but an outsize coastline of bays and inlets ideal havens for sea-fishing craft - but also of the culture’s profound concern with code and structure. Such codes govern how the creatures must be sliced up and arranged.   All this, of course, in the name of optimum aesthetic appeal and sensory pleasure, for these too are defining aspects of the national values. 

And as for the British, what food might depict the depths of the national soul?  The way things are going some might say it’s chlorinated chicken breasts from Delaware, but that question is for another CultureMorsel…