Food culture and signature dishes on the Swedish table

I, a total "wild mushroom virgin" with no foraging experience at all, stroll alone, watching the various mushrooms and fungi that poke their heads up like little elves in the dim forest, round and plump like illustrations from a fairy tale. Suddenly my head spins, both excited and confused: "Which of these can actually be eaten?"

My mushroom-picking experience is zero; at most I once picked a few bags at a tourist shiitake mushroom farm in Xinshe, Taichung.

Some mushrooms are as beautiful as flowers, stunningly lovely beyond words. Under a few shafts of sunlight filtering through the treetops, they glisten with an alluring sheen. By a Puritan-like biological instinct, I automatically skip over these siren temptresses, and seek out only the pure and plain village "shrooms."

But I am not too sure that earth-toned mushrooms are necessarily friendlier to my digestive system. What I face is a trial like "Shennong tasting a hundred herbs." Which is more shameful, after all? To eat greedily and die of poison, or to cling cravenly to life?

What were Shennong's dying words? I guess they were, "This stuff is poisonous! Nobody eat it!"

"Not eating mushrooms won't kill you, so why joke with your own life?" I mull it over, looking again and again at the wild mushrooms in my hand and the field guide, comparing back and forth, verifying their identity.

The more I look, the more suspicious they seem. Suddenly I get the creeps; once fear sets in, I simply toss these wild mushrooms, whose allegiance I cannot tell, away on the spot.

It seems the only place I can safely forage is the supermarket.

A middle-aged Swedish man watched from a distance, then walked over to me with a stern face: "Why are you throwing chanterelles around? These are delicious. What a waste! If you don't want to eat them, you shouldn't pick them. Leave them for others to pick!"

My conscience pricked me like a thief. My eyes fixed on a few bright yellow fungi on the ground that looked like trumpets, their caps edged with irregular waves, and I hardly dared look at him directly: "I'd love to eat them, but the problem is I'm not sure whether those can be eaten. I'm afraid I'll get poisoned."

His tone softened a little, and his face wore an expression that said, "This I understand all too well."

Seeing my cowardly look, loving to eat yet afraid to die, he burst out laughing: "As long as the amount is small, accidentally eating a poisonous mushroom will at most give you vomiting and diarrhea. Once you've thrown up and emptied out, you'll be fine….." But then he immediately turned cautious again: "Still, I can't fully guarantee there's no danger to life, because some toxins accumulate in the internal organs."

The conclusion is the same as before: you still can't eat them carelessly! I thought to myself, "Isn't that just stating the obvious?"

In the primeval mists of antiquity, everyone lived by hunting and foraging. When ancestors ate some plant or animal and not only did not die but found it delicious, they passed the experience on to later generations. How to find it, when to find it, where to find it, how to cook it, how to eat it, how to preserve it, and so on -- these survival guides were handed down from generation to generation, accumulating drop by drop to this day, and they represent the food culture of a particular place.

But the Taiwanese food culture I take for granted does not include knowing whether Swedish wild mushrooms can be eaten.

He looked helplessly at my Eastern face, which plainly showed me to be a blank slate when it came to wild mushrooms, and sighed: "Then I'll teach you. I'm going to teach my son anyway, so come pick with us." He then introduced himself as H.

H pointed to a boy with an Eastern face following behind him, B. With his father's endless encouragement, B slowly came over and shyly shook my hand, not saying a word. He had the build of someone about to enter high school, yet carried a childishness like that of a boy just starting elementary school. The soul inside that body was soft and timid, peeking out bashfully from his pupils.

At a glance you could tell B was intellectually disabled, quiet and gentle. He had no connection to the brutality of the world, nor the strength to resist it. Every gesture of H's made it clear that he wanted to protect his son's tender soul.

I thought to myself, "He must be adopted." My trust in H instantly rose quite a bit. A man broad-hearted enough to adopt a child with Down syndrome not of his own ethnicity usually does not commit crimes.

So I immediately treated H as a living field guide I could interact with, a beacon in the vast sea of mushrooms.

The three of us searched everywhere. H had eyes like torches, often able to detect like radar the wild mushrooms I had missed with my blind eyes. Even B seemed to wear a special pair of mushroom-finding X-ray glasses, often revealing along paths I had just walked clusters upon clusters of wild mushrooms I had overlooked. Edible mushrooms mostly have protective coloration, hiding behind tree roots and clumps of grass.

Holding several live specimens H had taught me about, whenever I found a mushroom suspected to be edible I called H over to identify it.

A doubt had been nagging at me all along, and I could not resist pointing at a bright little red umbrella leaning against a thick tree root and asking H: "Is this the kind from the Super Mario video game that makes you grow bigger when you eat it?"

"Super Mario?"

"Yeah….. I don't know if Sweden has that Japanese video game…. It was pretty popular in Asia when I was a kid."

"I worked in Asia for several years before, but I'm not too clear on that. Back then I was always busy from before dawn until midnight. This mushroom here is called the fly agaric. Eating it makes people hallucinate. Ever since the time of our ancestors the Vikings, it has been used as a psychedelic drug."

"That's so cool. Getting high around here is really convenient. Picking wild mushrooms can actually replace going to a nightclub. Super HIGH!" The bright red fly agaric, plump and fleshy, its cap dotted with little white circles, was as cute as a little stool for mountain elves.

When H heard the words "getting high," his expression changed: "Trust me, getting high is absolutely not convenient." He suddenly and very deliberately changed the subject, asking me: "Are you here in Sweden on vacation? Or do you live somewhere here?"

I said: "I'm just visiting friends for a few days. The day after tomorrow I'm going to Berlin."

I sensed that H was weighing things back and forth in his mind. After thinking it over, he led me and his son B through twists and turns deep into the forest, to a place few people visit, a hidden paradise. The three of us, all smiles, bent down to harvest the fresh delicacies all around, gently cradling these delicate, cold, damp little elves and placing them softly in the basket, celebrating a great wild mushroom harvest.

Nordic people are always tall and big, gentle and amiable, yet H's movements and speech had no extra motion. Between him and a clump of wild mushrooms there was only the shortest straight-line distance, as if calculated in advance, making him feel brisk and refined.

As H walked, he gave lessons to me and his son, teaching us everything he knew: "Picking wild mushrooms, to put it plainly, is just experience. You know what a tulip looks like, right?"

"Yes."

"Yes."

"For example, if you remember what a rose looks like, certain rose varieties with upward-facing calyxes are delicious, but at the same time you have to remember that there is one special rose with a downward-facing calyx that is poisonous. You must never be careless about this kind of exception. As long as you firmly remember these exceptions, you will never forget how to tell poisonous mushrooms apart."

H looked pleased with himself: "Many people don't pick wild mushrooms at all, because they're not sure whether they're safe. What a pity. Some people always pick only certain wild mushrooms, focusing on the one or two kinds that even a blind person could never mistake. As for me, I can tell the good from the bad, so I have a wide variety and eat very well." The variety of wild mushrooms in his big basket was indeed unusually rich.

I was a bit curious about what line of work this mushroom-picking master actually did. He not only knew almost every kind of wild mushroom, but could also speak eloquently about the seasons and local conditions. H answered: "Because I grew up here."

But I felt it was more than that. The moment he spoke of food he was elated, his face full of joy, talking on and on. I asked him how to cook wild mushrooms, and he enthusiastically shared countless recipes, almost dancing with delight.

Which wild mushrooms, once dried in the sun, can be preserved for years and taste even better.

Which mushrooms need to be boiled, first dissolving the toxins in the water, then skewered on a fork and roasted over a fire, for endless pleasure.

Which mushrooms should have the soil gently brushed off with a fine-bristled brush, then stir-fried with butter and salt, a delicacy on earth, and must absolutely not touch water, for once washed all is lost.

In the circle of wild mushroom pickers, directly asking a skilled picker where you can pick baskets and bags full to take home is about as shameless as casually asking a stranger to pay your bill.

Every mushroom picker has a few special places in their heart, more confidential than a secret base, more private than a personal bank account, more sacred than an altar.

You always have to get there before others beat you to it, so that you can pick to your heart's content in that place. After all, money lent out can still be demanded back, but once you reveal a mushroom treasure spot to an outsider and the wild mushrooms are picked clean, you'll have to wait until next year. Seasoned mushroom pickers always pluck wild mushrooms as gently as if caring for a baby, careful not to damage the mycelium structure underground, so that they can keep growing year after year.

I hesitated a little inside. Even if we had picked wild mushrooms together for an hour, was it really all right to casually go to a strange man's home?

H did not notice my inner misgivings, and went ahead and called someone on his mobile phone to bring the car around. When I walked back to the forest road together with father and son, a middle-aged Asian man was sitting in the driver's seat of a silver-gray VOLVO, head down, flipping through a book.

M was a Malaysian Chinese, able to speak fairly fluent Chinese, but like all highly educated people of Southeast Asian Chinese descent, English was already his primary language.

B walked up and called out "Dad," and presented the wild mushrooms as a treasure. Earlier I had heard him call H "Daddy."

H, being Swedish after all, was more than a head taller than M. The two of them came toward me with arms around each other's waists and shoulders, and H very naturally kissed M's hair. This casual peck actually shook me more than a French tongue kiss.

Facing the first gay family I had ever known in my life, I could not help being a little startled, but I tried hard to act as if everything were normal. Secretly relieved, I got in the car and went home with them, opening my belly wide in preparation for a great wild mushroom feast.

This was M's second marriage. B was the son of M and his wife, who had died of cancer.

As M's legal spouse, H signed the papers to adopt B and treated B as his own. He often took his son to the mushroom-picking spots of his own childhood, to experience the joys of childhood. H said: "The holiday cabin was built by my grandfather with his own hands. I plan to leave it to B in the future, so I often bring him here to pick wild mushrooms and swim in the nearby lake."

This family of three is a patchwork family that challenges nationality, race, gender and health, a representative of a diverse structure.For Swedes, a mushroom-picking spot is usually the place where they picked wild mushrooms with their family since childhood. Even if they find a new place, they let only family know.

I watched H in the cabin kitchen, agile and deft, moving among the stove and counters like flowing water, doing the most actions in the least time. The moment he picked up the spatula he was full of energy, with a thoroughly professional air. Just from his skill at chopping vegetables, you could tell at a glance that he had trained.

I wanted to go into the kitchen to help, but H politely escorted me out. I suppose the head chef thought me clumsy.

I quietly asked M: "Is H a chef?"

M was patiently teaching his son B to wipe the tiny bits of moss off the mushroom stems with a clean dry cloth, and without raising his head he said: "That's right, and the very best kind at that."

It turned out that after H finished his childhood "wild mushroom expert training camp" in the countryside, he went to Stockholm at thirteen to study at culinary school, entered the industry at fifteen, and became an executive chef at a young age. He moved between five-star hotels in different countries, and finally settled in Malaysia for M's sake.

Professional chefs live in a crazy world of strict hierarchy, male dominance, and relentless, pressing pace. Pursuing the muse of the temple of gastronomy, a chef must offer up his life to please, yet an ordinary person's energy is always far too little.

To endure long-term high pressure in a top restaurant, black coffee is far from enough.

H was fiercely competitive. To perk himself up and relieve stress, he underestimated a huge threat in the professional kitchen more terrifying and more commonplace than sharp knives and fierce fire.

Like many senior chefs before him, H began taking drugs, sinking deeper and deeper. How fragile people are, fragile enough that sometimes they enjoy the thrill of a rapid plunge.

To others, H was a successful chef, his tall white chef's hat so spotless, commanding dozens of subordinates, dominating the scene. But in the dead of night, when the empty kitchen was spotless, he had already become a prisoner in the clutches of drugs.(To read part two, please click here)