Chicken of the Woods: The Old Timer Knows

My grandson found the chicken of the woods before I did.

He was out on our trail when he came back to tell me he’d found something growing on the big old wild cherry tree that’s been dying for a while now.

“Come look.”

So I did.

And there it was.

A great bright flush of chicken of the woods growing right out of the old cherry—orange and yellow on top, creamy underneath, looking almost too beautiful to be something we could eat.

This was a new one for our woods for me. And when you’re talking about wild food, “I think I know what that is” isn’t good enough.

So we went through the process again.

He’s almost fourteen and has become very interested in foraging. We’ve done this before with things I regularly forage on our mountain, but this time we were looking at something neither of us had harvested here before. We looked closely at the photographs and characteristics. We ran the image through Google Photos. We read articles. We searched specifically for toxic look-alikes.

We talked about the mushroom.

We talked about the tree it was growing on.

We talked about what could be mistaken for it.

And then we talked about the importance of being absolutely sure before you put a wild food in your mouth.

I’ve told him that one of the best ways to positively identify a wild food is to talk to an old-timer.

Then I grinned at him.

“That’s me.”

It’s a joke, but only partly.

My great-grandmother foraged on the homeplace. She had twelve children to feed, and the woods and fields were part of the pantry. She knew what was coming up in the spring, what was ripe in the summer, what nuts were beginning to fall in the autumn. She knew what was good to eat and what wasn’t.

That kind of knowledge doesn’t disappear completely.

Sometimes it shows up again in a great-grandaughter, or a fourteen-year-old great-great-great grandboy walking down a trail.

The harvest

Once we’d satisfied ourselves that we had the right mushroom, we harvested some of the tender young growth.

There was a lot of it.

I cooked the whole harvest and froze about two-thirds of it for later. The rest I turned into something I’m calling chicken-of-the-woods salad.

Chicken salad, basically.

Mayo. Celery. Pickle relish. Some minced onion and a chopped green apple.

Passing it along

What I like most about this whole thing is that he found it.

Not me.

He saw something unusual and recognized that it might be something worth investigating. He came back to get me. Then we figured it out together.

That’s how knowledge ought to work, I think.

Not as a list of rules handed down from one generation to another, but as attention. Curiosity. Respect for what you don’t know. The willingness to stop and ask somebody who knows more.

Someday, he’ll probably know things about these woods that I don’t.

He’ll find things I walk right past.

And maybe someday he’ll be the old-timer someone else comes looking for.

For now, though, I’m happy to be the one he comes to ask.

After all, that’s what old-timers are for.