The mushroom lady returns

As I fiddled with phone calls and paperwork this morning, I heard the mushroom lady back in the opertory, explaining to the good doctor how to pickle a mushroom.

“You poot it in boiling water--”
“So you don't actually boil the mushrooms?”
“No, no, just poot them in it--”

In due time she left, and Dr. M came up to the front desk laughing. Yesterday the dental lab guy came along early in the morning for a long chat. He left a box of doughnuts (very good doughnuts, I might add) and in exchange Dr. M gave him a good pickled mushroom. He loved it. The lab guy also pickles mushrooms—we have a jar of his shaggy manes in the fridge—but he wanted her recipe. So this morning Dr. M asked her for it.

“I asked her to write down her recipe, and she did—in Russian! So when the lab guy comes, I'm going to give it to him.” He went away chuckling.

The lab guy came and retrieved it. I gather his response was, “Great! There's just one problem—I don't speak Russian!”

By now I'm understandably curious about the mushrooms. The good doctor, also, has determined I need to try them. So we go to the back room and he brings out the jar.

“I usually eat them with a paperclip.” He goes to the shelf with the denture-pokers and scrapers and prodders and pencils, and pulls off a paperclip bent into a big U. “It's a sort of fancy cocktail fork. This is how we sterilize it.” I grin and watch him pull out the gas burner. A flame about two inches tall shoots up, and he heats the ends until they're good and black. He flips off the burner and pokes the paperclip down into the cold pickle juice--“So you don't brand your tongue”--and handed jar and clip to me.

I stabbed an edulis bolitis, curvy white top on a stem almost as broad and round, dripping, dill leaves still clinging to it. It was good. It was enough to make me turn hobbit.