Big-city people get their mushrooms at the green grocer or at the greenhouse-nursery. Up here in the mountains, we search for mushrooms in the forest ourselves. The natives of the Erzgebirge come home with pails and baskets full of mushrooms. (Sometimes it happens, that a person comes home without having found any mushrooms at all, which raises the question of whether he was really looking for mushrooms) There’s really nothing tastier than a real mushroom-ragout speciality. Pearl mushrooms, stone mushrooms, birch mushrooms and chestnut mushrooms and especially, tube mushrooms and leaf mushrooms mixed together and fried - wow, does that ever taste good! Mushrooms are such a popular part of German life and folklore that the German word for mushroom (Pilz) is also used to refer to a person, such as in the word “Gluckspilz”, which means a “lucky fellow”. Picking mushrooms therefore is very much like picking friends, so you really have to know what you’re doing because their are good ones and bad ones out there (and not just in the forest), But of course, we natives of the Erzgebirge know all about that. Another matter entirely is that “radioactive fallout” resulting from the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at the power station at Tschernobyl. Several types of mushrooms especially the chestnut mushrooms were contaminated and rendered inedible for years. These however, we and our Mushroom-Expert, Charlie Albrecht, leave untouched.

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