Ramaria formosa
Haydenville, MA, mixed hemlock, eastern red oak forest, 20 yards from a beaver swamp.

A poisonous mushroom the size of my head with the texture of freshly lab-grown human flesh. This is the same mushroom from two angles. Click the thumbs to look at the full-size photos.

I’m finally halfway learning how to use the manual focus on my camera, which is no doubt clear from the encroachment of blur into these photos. Thing looks like some kind of crazy colony of sentient interdimensional alien mushrooms manipulating the fabric of space-time.

Still fuzzy about F-stop.

Suillius pictus
Graves Farm Sanctuary, Haydenville, MA, mixed hemlock, white pine and birch forest.

The suillii were everywhere in the woods this week—the driest, hottest week in awhile. The chanterelles, which thrived on practically the same ground just a few weeks before, were barely in evidence.

I’ve eaten painted suillius many times, prepared several ways—raw, as a pizza topping, sauteed in olive oil and butter and chilled for summer sandwiches–and I prefer them to every other mushroom I’ve tasted. With the possible exception of porcini pickled in light vinegar. Raw, they taste like what I imagined the ideal wild mushroom to taste like before I ever had one: nutty, earthy in the way of a portobello, rich like slightly burned butter, yet light in texture. The earthiness they impart to a robust, chunky pizza sauce…well, mmm. And sauteed, they turn creamy dark brown and become thick and chewy like a sauteed portobello. I make myself drool thinking about it.

Still, though—don’t go eating mushrooms you find in the woods, even if they look exactly like this, unless you actually know what you’re doing. Thanks.

Tonight at midnight, “Between Two Treasons”, the second in my hopefully never-ending series of short stories about those lovable, man-eating, gun-slinging, ten-gallon-hat-wearing, prick-devouring centaurs goes live in issue #23 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

It is not for the faint-at-heart. Or the underage.

But please go read it anyway.

And the first one too, if you like—which is here.

This is some gloriously beer-addled 17th-century monk’s copy of a copy of a long-lost ancient jewelry engraving depicting a cloven-hoofed centaur residing at the center of the labyrinth of Daedalus. Whoever that monk was, if I ever manage to hunt down his moldering skull, I will give it a fat, wet smooch.

What follows are Brillat-Savarin’s rules for achieving the perfect meal. As far as I’m concerned, among the poetry of the rational they ought to be considered on par with The Art of War, Ovid’s Art of Love, and the Phaedo. They open with a solemn invocation to a Muse of Eating invented on the spot, and they close with immortality—but what’s in between is the stuff of everyday, run-of-the-mill happiness.

But the impatient reader may ask, how, in this year of grace 1825, must a meal be contrived in order to combine the conditions which procure the pleasures of the table in the highest degree?

That question I am about to answer. Compose yourselves, readers, and pay attention; Gasterea inspires me, the prettiest of all the Muses; I shall be clearer than an oracle, and my precepts will go down the ages.

Let the number of guests be not more than twelve, so that the talk may be constantly general;

Let them be chosen with different occupations but similar tastes, and with such points of contact that the odious formalities of introduction can be dispensed with;

Let the dining-room be well lighted, the cloth impeccably white, and the atmosphere maintained at a temperature of from sixty to seventy degrees;

Let the men be witty without being too pretentious, and the women charming without being too coquettish;

Let the dishes be few in number, but exquisitely choice, and the wines of the first quality, each in its class;

Let the service of the former proceed from the most substantial to the lightest, and of the latter, from the mildest to the most perfumed;

Let the progress of the meal be slow, for dinner is the last business of the day; and let the guests conduct themselves like travellers due to reach their destination together;

Let the coffee be piping hot, and the liqueurs chosen by a connoisseur;

Let the drawing-room be large enough to allow a game at cards to be arranged for those who cannot do without, yet still leave space for postprandial conversations;

Let the guests be detained by the charms of the company and sustained by the hope that the evening will not pass without some further pleasure;

Let the tea be not too strong, the toast artistically buttered, and the punch mixed with proper care;

Let retirement begin not earlier than eleven o’clock, but by midnight let everyone be in bed.

Whoever has been present at a meal fulfilling all these conditions may claim to have witnessed his own apotheosis; and for each of them who which is forgotten or ignored, the guests will suffer a proportionate decrease of pleasure.

—Jean-Anthelme Brillat Savarin, Physiologie du goût, ou Méditations de gastronomie transcendante

It’s hard not to notice: the man’s got an ego on him. But he’s not wrong, is he? This stuff is gold. Interpret some of these things metaphorically, the way I do, say, that line about giants in the bible, and he could really be talking about my local writing group in Noho the other week, a recent weekend with my gaming pals, a night of blissful exhaustion and bisquick pizza cooked over a propane burner on a trail somewhere under the stars, or a protracted dinner with the Homeless Moon. Some of the most rewarding experiences of my life.