But as I walk the trails near Királykút (King’s Spring) or on meadows close to Visegrád, I scan the undergrowth for the telltale signs of edible berries, mushrooms or clumps of wild garlic, the leaves of which happen to make a great salad if you combine them with a bit of blue cheese and some sun-dried tomatoes. (It’s a bit late for wild garlic now as they grow at the end of spring, but you might still find some high in the Alps.)
But my favorites are wild strawberries and raspberries. As small as the nail on your pinky, they are a bit difficult to discover, you have to keep an eye out for their angular leaves. But if you do manage to find them, prepare yourself for an intense burst of sunshine on your tongue that will make food industry experts who concoct “forest fruit” flavors seem the clumsy henchmen they are. Unfortunately, the berries are often amidst huge patches of nettles, but hey, you can’t have everything.
Wild strawberries adapt themselves well to all sorts of habitats with sunshine, so you can find them in meadows as well. If you do, then you just might be lucky enough to use them as indicators to pick one of the most wide-spread and delicious mushrooms in Hungary, Marasmius oreades or szegfűgomba (a.k.a. fairy ring mushrooms). They are relatively easy to recognize: they grow in circular clumps in the grass after rain. Their hats are white from both above and below and have small indentations all around. But please don’t pick any mushrooms you are not 100% certain of, and even if you are, take them to Vásárcsarnok, where mycologists will look them over for free – poisoning yourself is so stupid.
Mushrooms always pose questions of life and death. First of all, many of them eat cadavers, which is a bit disturbing (the rest, the “vegetarian” mushrooms live in peaceful symbiosis with certain plants’ roots). But if they weren’t there to break down organic material, life would have long ago run out of building blocks. So they are in fact the cleaning crew after all of us plants and animals who ultimately draw our energy from sunshine. Oh, and some mushrooms can eat petrochemicals as well, a digestive capability which only a few bacteria could rival.
Szegfűgomba has another trick up its sleeve. It can revive itself after completely drying out. This is not just rehydration, it starts to breathe again after having stopped. (It has something to do with a sugar its cells contain, but we don’t know what exactly.) How is that for weird?
But the weird goes on: they are huge, often even several kilometers wide, and decades or centuries old – yet invisible. We don’t know why, where or when the strands of mushroom, the hyphae bring forth their visible fruit, the stuff we eat. It has something to do with rain.
So don’t be surprised if you do not manage to find any after trekking in the Pilis for hours. I have the perfect consolation for your growling stomach: a home-cooked meal of Hungarian comfort food at Kis Rigó in Pilisszentlászló.
