Bring a knife and a basket, the invitation said.
They had me at "knife".
This is the basic prepper survival tool; when civilisation collapses around us, which it is about to do at any minute, those of us who remember to pack a good knife will thrive and flourish, while those who don't will just be very miserable.SHROOM SERVICE
Goldman's day job is walking through forests, usually those of the Cape Peninsula, looking for mushrooms.
This makes him sound like an otherworldly hippy, but do the maths — he collects 250kg to 350kg of porcini mushrooms alone per season, and sells them for upwards of R200 a kilo. Then there's the pine rings, the russulas, and countless others.
These figures are for a good year: this year has been anything but.
The drought in the Western Cape has cut Goldman's harvest drastically, and our host at Delheim, Nora Sperling-Thiel, feared at one point that there would be no mushrooms for us to forage.
The region had its first good rains of the season 10 days before the event in mid-June, so our ramble through the pine trees was not entirely fruitless.
But Sperling-Thiel's despair made clear the fatal flaw in my survival strategy — if climate change means drought and heat, it also means no more mushrooms.
I used it as a teachable moment. Forget the future, I told myself, it doesn't exist! Live for the moment. And in just a moment we will have lunch and lots of Delheim wine.
Lunch was delectable, thanks in large part to Goldman, who took the precaution of pre-picking enough mushrooms to feed the 40 or so participants in the event.
(There's a limit on numbers, so it's a bit like trying to get tickets to a Justin Bieber concert.)
Goldman said he had walked for four hours the day before and had collected about 4kg of the pine rings (Lactarius deliciosus), shrimp russulas (Russula xerampelina), so called because they taste of seafood, and poplar boletes (Leccinum duriusculum), that chef Bruce von Pressentin used in his tagliatelle.Goldman gets a bit carried away when he talks about porcini. "Beautiful mushrooms. Have a sniff ... it smells divine. It's like nutty, woody ... take a little piece and taste. Very nice. Porcinis are the best. Wonderful. Mushroom-hunters' delights."
He recommends cooking all mushrooms (and eating them within 24 hours) but makes an exception for porcini, which can be shaved raw into a salad.
The ones he finds that are past their best have greenish sponge under their caps, the polypore, which he dries.
"When I dry the polypore, I grind it into a powder, and the Italian chefs buy this from me for R1,000 a kilo. I can't make enough of it. They put it in their risottos; porcini stock, it is wonderful."
One of his sidelines is selling porcini trees: oak saplings whose roots have been inoculated with porcini spore, so you can grow your own, climate change permitting.
BEWARE THE DEADLY MUSHROOMS
Goldman said there were six deadly species in South Africa, among them the death cap. One of the ways to identify it is by the sac-like structure it grows from, so whenever you pick a mushroom, pick the whole thing all the way down to the bottom.
Mushrooms change colour and shape depending on the weather and how long they have been growing, so identification becomes a gamble for the novice.
"Don't pick after rain because they change colour. Always have an expert with you," said Goldman.
"If you're walking through the forest, and you find mushrooms, and they happen to have sponge or polypore under the cap, they're all edible," he said.
So are the cultivated button mushrooms in your local grocer, but you might lose interest in them once you have eaten the wild ones.
• Goldman is willing to help identify the mushrooms you find. Contact gary@mushroomfundi.co.za or call 073-936-2378...