mushrooms & sauerkraut
OCTOBER 2025
Are you going to send me to mushroom school? (Austra Muižniece)
italy
Austra Muižniece has seen mushrooms in the forest in the Lazio region outside Rome. Her inner Latvian recoils: it turns out she needs to undergo a 12 hour course in mushrooming to be allowed to pick them!
Photos from Austra Muižniece’s personal archive.
Austra Muižniece in Rome talks about mushrooms she bought in a shop. Austra says: “The beginning of cognitive mushroom dissonance in Italy — a terribly happy Austra, who found porcini at the Eataly supermarket in Rome, proudly shows them to her housemates over a call, but hasn’t yet opened the stems and doesn’t know what awaits her. O teora, o mores, holy indignation when it turns out that Italians dare to sell wormy mushrooms in a fancy store, mushrooms that no self-respecting Latvian would carry out of the forest. The physical evidence had to be documented! In the end, though, I managed to make a wonderful mushroom meal with the few porcini that weren’t wormy, plus some other mushrooms bought alongside them.”
Austra Muižniece talks about the best purchase on a trip:
“I can be in an indescribably beautiful place, for example, on the Amalfi Coast, but the highlight of my day is getting my hands on an exceptional mushroom knife, if not the mushrooms themselves.”
Austra Muižniece talks about buying mushrooms in Italy:
“Here’s what market mushrooms look like locally. Kārta, Dēkla, and Laima would probably disapprove of buying mushrooms, but what can you do if you don’t yet have a mushroom-picking certificate? In later years, I found out that selling porcini with the entire root attached is the norm, at least in the Rome region and in Tuscany, so it’s a bit like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get inside that porcini. I’ve even seen porcini carpaccio with clearly visible worm holes.”
Austra Muižniece talks about mushroom picking in an unusual place in Italy:
“When we actually get the chance to pick them ourselves, it’s pure joy. These photos are from Tuscany with my mom, when we were in the Boboli Gardens in Florence. While half-listening to the guide’s commentary, my peripheral vision caught sight of porcini all around , there was no choice but to pick them. I must note, though, that it felt almost shameful to collect mushrooms in a plastic bag, since they get stuffy and spoil faster, but there really wasn’t any other option. Back home in the forests of Latvia, if you stumble upon a perfect patch of mushrooms unprepared, you can always make an improvised cloth bag out of, say, a sweater to carry the treasures home, but in Florence, I wasn’t quite ready for such eccentric behavior!”
Austra Muižniece talks about growing mushrooms:
“If a Latvian just can’t get to the mushrooms in the forest, sometimes the mushrooms have to come to the Latvian. I got myself a box of oyster mushroom mycelium, set it up in the garden, watered it diligently, and several times a day would inspect it carefully, gloomily thinking that nothing much would come of it. And for a long time, nothing did. But once the mushrooms finally started growing, they grew so fast that at one point I was afraid they might take over the whole house or, heaven forbid, spread into the neighbor’s garden. At least that fulfilled the rule that a proper Latvian must pick their mushrooms themselves, not buy them in a store.”
