Kafka’s Cookbook

Episode Two: A Journey from the Kitchen to Nature

by Uwe Heitkamp

Who hasn’t thought about it? Who hasn’t done it? Going into the woods and picking mushrooms. To do this, you need to know something about the subject. If you take a knowledgeable mushroom guide with you the first time, and if you select only one specific tasty variety (such as the chanterelle, for example), then, with a bit of luck, you’ll find them in the coming weeks after the winter rains in the region’s still-intact, damp pine forests.

We’re talking here, of course, about forests that haven’t yet been ravaged by wildfires. Chanterelles are a delicacy and go well with Portuguese sweet potatoes. Chanterelles always grow where we have predominantly coniferous forests, not monocultures, but mixed forests with cedars and cork oaks – preferably under umbrella pines.

We should, therefore, cherish and care for the forest, protecting it from the commercial interests of the paper industry, as well as from hunters. Then we can have a lasting experience that will continue to be formative for a lifetime. For the forager finds much more than just mushrooms in the forest, including wild berries, for example. In my youth, I wandered through the forest with a small basket and found not only blueberries, but also wild strawberries. They are much smaller than the strawberries produced by industrial agriculture, but they have an intense aroma and taste much sweeter.

The writer Franz Kafka lived in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. On 1 October, 1902, a young woman called Ana Pouzarová came to live with the Kafka family to work as the governess for the children and to manage the household. In an interview that she gave more than 60 years later, at the ripe old age of 82, this woman recalled her life in the Kafka household, where meals were prepared without meat or fish, mentioning a cookbook that they used with recipes based solely on a diet of plants. On page 160, we find the chanterelles. I won’t reveal any more than that.

In Monchique, there was once a small, but great man who was exceptionally knowledgeable about mushrooms and able to distinguish the edible from the poisonous: Professor Carlos Abafa, the co-founder of our cooperative, which publishes ECO123. I had the privilege of wandering through the woods with him a few times. Carlos was a gifted collector, an even better illustrator, and truly a master in his own kitchen. Collectors have their minds in their heads, while hunters have their brains elsewhere. I remember a very slow hike that we took together through a completely impenetrable forest. We had to cut a narrow path to reach the mushrooms, hidden deep in unspoiled nature. Nowadays, this land is home to the Monchique heliport. Back then, however, after two hours of foraging, we were able to fill our small basket with mushrooms and went back home to the kitchen, where we cleaned the fungi and began to sauté them lightly in local olive oil, together with onions, just to preserve their flavour.

And that’s precisely what Kafka’s cookbook is about. The recipes are simple and good because the book is primarily about the ingredients, which you have to find in the forest and at the market, not in the shopping mall. My love for sourcing good, original food also stems from that time. For example, I only buy my eggs at the Friday market in Monchique from a woman, Dona Madalena, who feeds and cares for her chickens naturally. And I buy my sweet potatoes, beans and so on there, too. I wish you a good week with even better natural foods and with the appropriate herbs.