Wild and Outside

When Morels Rise from the Cool Earth with Chef/Forager Chris Vergara

Edible Hudson Valley/Edible Westchester, Spring 2018

By Julia Sexton

In which I brave ticks and a lack of bathrooms to go on a morel hunt, but end up talking about how local foods and seasonality define cuisine. Jen May did the photography, and it is stunning.

We are in a public woodland not 15 minutes from Chef Chris Vergara’s two Rivertown restaurants, Harper’s and Saint George. His third, Meritage in Scarsdale, is 30 minutes away. Here, in the cool green shade, oblivious suburbanites jog and walk their dogs—for them, these woods are just a local park. Vergara, kitted with a pocket knife and a cross-body canvas bag, drops off the path, peering up at the canopy and then down at the earth. He’s scanning for the elms and tulip poplars whose shade most predictably shelters morels. Vergara has already pulled 15 pounds of morels from these woods and there’s still time for more.

Morel season is cruelly short. The Hobbity-looking mushrooms appear in spring when the air temperature reaches the 60s and the soil temperature touches the 50s. In late May, when the air temperature rises above 70°, the morels shrivel and then disappear. If all of the factors are in place—and that’s a big if—you’re only looking at a few weeks of morels.

And they’re expensive. A few clicks reveal that, were they not sold out, you could order fresh morels from Earthy Delight for $59 a pound. At a local farmers’ market, morels will set you back $10 for an insultingly inadequate quarter pound. Wholesale to restaurants isn’t much cheaper, with prices starting at $30 per pound for black, and $40 per pound for yellow. Morels don’t age well, either: Their honeycombed caps are prone to breakage.

In the parking lot, before we set out, Vergara hands me a brown shopping bag half full of morels that he’s already picked. “Look at these,” he says. “It sounds crazy, but just stare at them for, like, a minute—let your eyes get used to them. It’ll make them easier to see.”

Unlike ramps, morels do not want to be found. They’re short, and their yellows, browns and greys mimic the leaf debris where they grow. Morels like to hide under fern fronds and in the crevices where rotting logs meet the soil; there is a high degree of Where's Waldo in hunting morels.

We reach a spot that looks just like every other (likely tick-infested) glade that we’ve walked through. Vergara scans the ground and, satisfied, looks back at me, eyes wide in expectation. I’m clearly supposed to do something. I squint. I crouch. I lean down, cheek close to the ground. This has become annoying.

And then it’s there. Big as life. I pull my knife and drop to my knees—needless to say, this interview has ended. We work quickly and I’m getting to some morels, but there are others that I only spot when Vergara reaches for them. He is better at the pattern recognition; he’s dialed in.

Vergara’s obsession with foraging did not start locally. “The first time I knew this was something that I needed to get into, I was actually in Jamaica.” He continues, “We’d hired this driver, and one of the touristy things he suggested was a tour of a ganja farm. We tour the thing, but while we’re walking back to the car, this Rasta is pointing out wild basil, and turmeric, and vegetables and herbs that I’d never seen before. And there were spices, like pimento wood, that are delicious and exotic. And it’s all fresh—that’s the thing."

“At this point, the least interesting thing to me on this trip was the ganja.”

We see field garlic and verdant fields of ramps, but Vergara stops at a plant that grows rampant in my backyard. It’s about a foot tall, with floppy, serrated-edge leaves and clusters of tiny white flowers like baby’s breath. In my life, it’s a weed.

“This is garlic mustard. It’s everywhere. It’s a little late in the season, but go ahead and eat the flowers.” Actually, this is clearly food. “There’s a bit of sweetness from the nectar, but on the back end, it tastes like broccoli rabe that’s been sautéed with garlic. At the restaurants, we chiffonade this and finish pastas with it. And, obviously, there are pestos.” He sighs. “I can’t understand why everyone isn’t eating this.”

Beyond yielding specific flavors (or even dishes), foraging for native plants in season raises broader ideas about culture. It’s harder, for instance, to define the regional cuisine of the Hudson Valley than it is to define the regional cuisine of Tuscany, and the two are comparable in size. This is because, here, we are an ever-changing population of immigrant cultures who impose our foodways onto the land, rather than adapting to it. Had we been sitting on this land for a couple of millennia like the Tuscans, we might have thousands of recipes for garlic mustard. It could be our rosemary.

“Eating wild native plants goes, to a large degree, toward defining the cuisine of a region,” Vergara says. “Seasonality. Locality. That’s a big deal.”