Fieldwork by Iliana Regan

I came upon a review of this book in The Week, and was attracted to it because the writer is a chef and the subject was food. That is in fact true and wrong. The author is a chef, but the book is more about her growing up, feeling like a boy trapped in a girl's body, and somehow being out and about made the dysphoria more bearable. The part of her life that entails being a chef is not really covered here. Mushrooms are something she collects for business and pleasure. They also connect her to her forebears. Great-grandmother Busia from a village in northern Poland used boletus to give czarnina, duck blood soup, the flavor of the forest. Regan spent countless childhood hours searching for wild mushrooms among the oak, pine and hemlock of rural Indiana with her father. She watched keenly as her mother cleaned and sliced the day’s find on the counter island in their farmhouse kitchen. Wild mushrooms even made an appearance in the hospital room not long after her birth. Today, she collects them on her land in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and serves them to guests at the Milkweed Inn, which she owns and runs with her wife, Anna. I very much enjoyed this, but my spouse, a fellow foodie, was less enthralled. So it may be a matter of taste.