Editor’s note: OPB’s video series “Superabundant” explores the stories behind the foods of the Pacific Northwest. Now we’re taking the same guiding principles to a new platform: Email. We’ve brought on food writer Heather Arndt Anderson, a Portland-based culinary historian and botanist, to highlight different aspects of the region’s food ecosystem every week. Read below to get a taste of Friday’s newsletter, where Arndt Anderson explores the history of mushroom foraging in the Northwest.

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It’s finally feeling like autumn around here. The afternoons are a golden glory of falling leaves and the ground is littered with acorns and spiny chestnut hulls. That also means that wild mushrooms are peeking their little heads up out of the forest duff, waiting to end up in your soup pot. Which former Portland mayor started Oregon’s first mycological society? Read on to find out!

Small bites: domestic futurism, Hoosier bananas, and getting forest fires out of wine

Rosey the Robot turns 60. When the first episode of “The Jetsons” aired on Sept. 23, 1962, Americans got their first glimpse of an imagined future: jetpacks, flying cars, holograms and household robots to do our dirty work. In the 1980s, Oregon inventor Frances Gabe tried to force this futuristic prophecy by creating her own self-cleaning house, which still stands in Newberg. We may not have flying cars (yet!) but between the Roomba dusting our floors and smart appliances that allow us to control our ovens using a cell phone and a Wi-Fi connection, we’d say this is the future we were promised. Is R2D2 the future of food? Watch the Robots episode of Superabundant.

Pawpaws are in season, if you’re lucky enough to find any. In The Atlantic last week, Yasmin Tayag wrote about the elusive pawpaw (Asimina triloba), a North American fruit with a silky texture like ripe avocado and a flavor that’s somewhere between a mango, pineapple, and a jackfruit (they’re closely related to cherimoya, a tropical fruit much loved by the Inca). When they’re green they look like an oversized lima bean, but quickly succumb once separated from the tree, taking on the golden and brown-bruise hue (and heady aroma) of an overripe banana, lending pawpaws the nickname “Hoosier banana.” In the Northwest we may not have vast pawpaw patches in which to wander way down yonder, but they are hardy enough to grow in most locations.

Enologists are helping gobsmoked vineyards. When it comes to terroir, we love local wines with hints of forest floor on the nose. Forest fire? Not so much. While we haven’t yet figured out a way to stop wildfires from happening in the first place, scientists are now working with wineries to reduce the impacts of wildfire smoke on wine grapes. Chardonnay doesn’t seem to be as susceptible to smoke as Pinot noir, but learning how to remove the smoke compounds from the wine will be crucial in ensuring consistent quality (and fewer notes of ashtray and chimney soot) across future vintages.

In memorial: Sarah Pilner. Acclaimed chef Sarah Pliner was killed last week while riding her bike in southeast Portland. A three-time James Beard Award semifinalist, she co-founded Aviary in 2011, where she mixed French technique with global flavors. As driven as she was talented, Pliner often shied away from the limelight, letting her work speak for her. “She was not an ego person,” says food writer Michael Zusman. “She just wanted to cook great food and she accomplished every bit of that.” Friends and colleagues shared their memories with OPB, which you can read and listen to here. — Crystal Ligori

Mushrooming in Oregon: A brief history

Though Northwest fall, winter and spring tend to be mild and wet, the summer is hot and dry, and this is why the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest teem with conifers. Firs, pines, hemlocks and cedars are all at a distinct evolutionary advantage here; the antifreeze coursing through their veins keeps them free from cold damage, while their thin, rigid needles are resistant to the desiccating effects of evapotranspiration — they just don’t wilt. And because our forests are dominated by conifers, so too are our soils dominated by fungal friends of conifer roots: ectomycorrhizal fungi like chanterelles, porcini, matsutake, and morels. The mycorrhizae (meaning “fungal root”) of these species form symbiotic bonds with trees, not just giving the non-photosynthetic fungi enough nutrients to fruit (this is what mushrooms are!) but allowing the trees to collect more nutrients from the soil, conserve water, and to even communicate with one another.

Fire ecology

Though fire has been part of the ecology of the Pacific Northwest since time immemorial, wildfires have seen an uptick in frequency and severity over the past decade. Some pines require fire to open their serotinous cones, but fire hurts most plants. Mushrooms, on the other hand, spend most of their time under the soil surface, hiding out in vast mycelial networks that make the World Wide Web look like a game of cat’s cradle. Fire can reduce fungal species richness, yes, but the resilience of soil fungi is key in helping Northwest forests recover from fire. So much happens beneath the soil surface, away from prying eyes; mapping the “wood wide web” has only just begun, and ecologists have barely reached the tip of the hyphal iceberg.

Because they’re symbiotic with conifers and oaks, chanterelles (Oregon’s official state mushroom) have long evaded our attempts at domestication. In forest plantations, chanterelles fruit when the stand reaches 10-40 years of age, but in dry years they do better in the accumulated dampness of a mature forest. They’re more abundant after a hot summer, and seem to disproportionately favor the hardscrabble life on the edges of abandoned logging roads and old skid trails. They’re predictable in their tolerance of a ruckus.

Morels even more blatantly favor drama, thriving on tree death, soil disturbance, fire and perdition. (To wit, a delivery of free wood chips from the city of Portland’s street tree-trimming has been known to yield crops of little blond morels, even in urban gardens.) Morels exhibit a lavish, obligate response to fire, flourishing most in the springtime after a fire has cleared an area and augmented the soil with carbon. Some species will only grow for a year or two following fire, then patiently wait for the next ecological tantrum before peeking back out. The removal of nitrogen and deposition of carbon — both of which fire accomplishes handily — are key to a mushroom’s happiness.

Harry Lane: A fun guy

Note: the following sections are adapted from Portland: A Food Biography.

In November of 1913, journalist Annie Laura Miller wrote for the Sunday Oregonian that in Portland’s Irvington neighborhood (then a mostly empty land claim with a few scattered homes), one woman gathered all the shaggy manes she and her husband could eat, while the woman’s neighbor picked meadow mushrooms for her household only six blocks away in an empty field. The title of her article, “Mushrooms are Thick on the Edges of Portland,” is as true now as it was then.

American cooking didn’t often feature mushrooms until the 1890s, when mushrooms were first commercially cultivated in Pittsburgh. They were prohibitively expensive for most people, and Oregonians generally harvested their own out in the woods. Responding to a new need, Oregon’s first mycological society formed in 1899, as the Mushroom Club of Oregon. Dr. Harry Lane, an outspoken progressive Democrat who would go on to become mayor of Portland, was the club’s first president. “Those who do not care to join the club,” wrote Lane in an article for The Oregonian, “...can easily learn to distinguish between the wholesome and poisonous species by eating of every species they find, and leaving it to the coroner to do the rest.”

Before he took the helm of the Mushroom Club, Lane had published several articles in The Oregonian with the proper scientific description of various mushrooms and information on their habitats, to both encourage mycological appreciation and to deter the consumption of toadstools. Rather than approaching the topic solely for science, Lane went out of his way to promote mushrooms for gustatory pleasure, ranking edible species according to his palate.

Not to yuck anyone’s yum, but Lane’s preferences clashed with today’s conventions of what’s considered a “choice edible.” For example, he was wholly unimpressed by boletes — better known as porcini — a mushroom absolutely adored by Italians. Lane conceded that it could be a desirable addition to the dinner table; “like a singed cat, it is better than it seems.” He also seems to have completely ignored chanterelles, which are plentiful, easily identified with no deadly lookalikes, and superb sautéed with butter and shallots. Lane marched to the beat of his own mycological drum, preferring underdog russulas, writing that “[n]o more savory or delicate morsel comes to the pan” than the yellow-gilled mushroom and purple russula. He called bizarre-looking helvellas (aka elfin saddles) “the vegetable gnome of the woods.” He had nice enough things to say about morels (“one of the best varieties of edible fungi”) and tolerated oyster mushrooms (“a fairly good variety”).

Pickin’ ain’t easy

As a people, Eastern Europeans have a special affinity for wild mushrooms, but the years of lingering toxicity following the 1986 nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl meant that Russian fungi were radioactively contaminated and unsafe to eat. By the early 1990s, demand in Eastern Europe drove the prices of wild mushrooms sky high. Oregon mushroom pickers were happy to oblige the growing demand, especially for a few hundred dollars a day. “For greed, all nature is too little,” said first century philosopher Seneca the Younger, and in 1993, 22 year-old commercial picker Phay Eng was murdered and robbed of his mushroom harvest. At the time, there had been reports of three other incidents where shots were fired to defend prime picking locations, and other reports of pickers staking out spots and setting up camps armed with assault rifles and pit bulls.

By the early 2000s, matsutake mushrooms were commanding more than $150 per pound on Japanese markets. Growing mostly beneath the pine duff, harvesting matsutake requires a sharp eye, but a busy picker could earn a thousand dollars within a few hours, if they made it out alive. David Arora wrote in his 1979 “Mushrooms Demystified” that the odor of the mushroom is “provocative compromise between Red Hots and smelly socks,” but another Oregon mushroom is even more famous for its tantalizing aroma: the truffle.

Watch the Truffles episode of Superabundant

Like the matsutake, truffles grow beneath the organic duff, but unlike the matsutake, truffles never offer humans a visual clue to their presence. With the help of well-trained dogs and a hand rake, truffle hunters can unearth truffles of every hue: black, winter white, spring white and the relatively rare Oregon brown truffle, whose scientific namesake Kalapuya refer to the tribes of indigenous Oregonians who historically inhabited the Willamette Valley, where truffles are harvested today. After sampling them at the 1977 “Mushrooms and Man Symposium’' in Albany, Oregon, James Beard declared that Oregon truffles are every bit as good as their Italian cousins. Truffles, perhaps even local ones, were a key ingredient in the goose liver patties presented by Portland’s Council of Jewish Women in “The Neighborhood Cook Book” of 1912.

Recipe: Hungarian mushroom barley soup

Any kind of mushroom will do in this hearty soup — creminis are always a solid (and easy-to-source) choice, but should you find yourself in a glut of chanterelles or hedgehogs, this is a beautiful way to showcase them. And if you can find it, we love Camas Country Mill’s ‘Purple Karma’ barley, an heirloom variety reintroduced by Oregon State University. This soup is also easily made dairy-free; you can sub fresh soy milk (such as Ota Tofu’s) and use vegan sour cream. Makes 6-8 servings.

Ingredients

• 4 tbsp butter
• 1 large white onion, diced
• 1 lb mushrooms, sliced
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• ½ cup dry white wine
• 4 cups chicken or vegetable stock
• 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp ground black pepper
• 1 tbsp chopped fresh thyme
• 1 tbsp Hungarian sweet paprika
• 1 cup pearl barley
• ½ cup heavy cream or 1 cup whole milk
• 3 tbsp flour
• ¼ cup sour cream or crème fraîche (plus more for garnish)
• 2 tbsp chopped fresh dill
• 2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley

Instructions

1. In a large, heavy-bottomed Dutch oven, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onions, mushrooms, and salt, and sauté for 5 minutes, until they begin to soften and brown.
2. Deglaze the pot with the white wine, stirring with a wooden spoon to get any browned bits. Add the stock, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, pepper, thyme, paprika, and barley. Bring to a boil, then cover and reduce heat to a simmer. Cook for 20 minutes, or until the barley is tender.
3. Stir together the cream or milk and flour until smooth, then stir the mixture into the soup. Simmer for 5 minutes, until slightly thickened.
4. Stir in the sour cream, dill, and parsley until combined, and adjust seasoning as needed to suit your taste. Serve with another dollop of sour cream, more herbs, and a generous dash of pepper.

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