In search of some natural delicacies

Evidence of the progress of learning at Princeton is abundant but also ambiguous. For example I might cite the relationship between the efflorescence of the life sciences and the decline of the wild mushroom omelet. Such omelets have been among my traditional autumn pleasures, along with Tiger football and the maple tree at the southeast corner of McCosh quad.

The field mushroom is, or was, very common in these parts in September and October. Indeed, its Latin name, agaricus campestris, means "fungus of the campus," where "campus" in turn once meant not a jumble of high-rises but a flat expanse of land, an open field, as in the ancient and rich agricultural areas of France and Italy called Champagne and the Campagna, or the neglected English word "champaign." We learn in French 101 that any mushroom is a champignon, but that merely testifies to the commonplace kind of linguistic "mission creep" by which the successful specific becomes the monopolistic generic, so that a kleenex is any tissue and a xerox any photocopy, let the patent attorneys be damned. The French gourmet fully appreciates the champ (field) in the champignon for which he is, as it were, champing at the bite.

The gastronomic difference between a wild mushroom and one of the "organic" imitations grown in caves in Pennsylvania is by no means trivial. The relationship between ingesting a genuine champignon plucked from the golf course and downing a commercial mushroom fetched from the Stop-and-Shop in its plastic punt is roughly that between taking a bath and taking a bath with your socks on. Sliced and lightly sautéed in butter, then folded into beaten eggs with a few slivers of Gruyère, the local campestris offers a foretaste of heaven.

But to have an abundance of field mushrooms, one must have a sufficiency of fields. The green spaces of the Princeton campus have shrunk alarmingly in recent decades, and with them the autumnal mushroom harvest. At Princeton, buildings may spring up like mushrooms, but they don't taste anywhere near as good. There were once plenty of boleti and some edible russulaceae (mere brown and red toadstools to the masses) where the Spelman apartments now lurk. As a fledgling assistant professor, I gathered several messes of scrumptious parasols (lepiota procera) on the bank-side now monopolized by Peyton Hall. The March of Science has been particularly cruel to the campus campestris. The Icahn lab gobbled up the best site, and the next on the ranked list is now a large hole waiting to be filled by a science library.

It's all a matter of priorities, of course, and in the great scheme of things, even so powerful a force as my appetite for omelets must give up the field to the almighty Lewis-Sigler Institute. I am no Walter Duranty, the New York Times' man in Moscow in the 1930s, who disgracefully won a Pulitzer Prize for his fawning collaboration with Stalinism. He popularized the adage that "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." The transcendentally valuable omelet was "Socialism," the regrettable but necessary egg-breaking terror, repression and mass murder on a scale that even Hitler couldn't match. My omelets are of only contingent importance.

The last adequate hunting grounds are the athletic fields between the old observatory and Western Way, south and east of the baseball diamond. There, I gathered a large sack full of champignons a week ago Saturday. Delicious, but the field is by no means uncontested. In the first place, you have to suss out the grass-cutting schedule, which is somewhat erratic. There is a fairly brief window of opportunity between the time the whole field is razed — grass and fungi alike — and the time the rebounding grass grows long enough to mask from the hunter's view the white sporophores of the tenderest mushrooms. More severe is competition from the football team, who through the autumn weeks conduct their strenuous calisthenics here. Though these guys occasionally have trouble with the Cornell front line, they are death on mushrooms.

Pleasurable anticipation of my omelet was somewhat inhibited by the huge backhole inexplicably at rest in the field just across FitzRandolph. I fear I shall soon see there a maze of surveyor's stakes, their pink plastic tassels blowing in the breeze, along with a contractor's sign announcing that Coming Soon is Princeton University's new Pilzmörder Institute of Regressive Mycology. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.