Veronica Williams: The mushroom queen continues her reign

Published 6:53 am Tuesday, December 29, 2015

If any person alive has earned her nicknames, it is 84-year-old Veronica Williams, a saucy, sharp-witted plum cake of a woman known throughout the region as “The Mushroom Lady,” “The Mushroom Guru” and “The Mushroom Queen.”

Williams, who wears a ruby-studded gold pendant shaped like the poisonous amanita mushroom, is widely considered the foremost expert on fungi.

On most mornings, she takes to the woods near her home 10 miles south of South Bend or to remote forested areas along the highway.

There, basket in hand, Swiss Army Knife deployed, she forages for wild edibles: herbs, berries, nettles, fiddleheads, watercress … and mushrooms, the object of a lifelong romance that has spanned the globe.

“All I can say is, I fell in love with mushrooms when I was 3, and I’m still in love with mushrooms,” said Williams, a native of Hungary, where she grew up in the Carpathian Mountains. “It’s something I do with a passion.”

The main author of two books on mushrooms — a field guide and a cookbook — Williams said she can identify a mushroom over the phone by its origin and description. In October, she led a group of more than 40 students on a mushroom foraging adventure.

“Her knowledge is really vast,” said Karmen Hughes, an owner at Blue Scorcher Bakery & Cafe, who has gone mushrooming with the Mushroom Queen.

Williams’ handpicked kings, oysters, turkeys, chanterelles and matsutakes find their way into the soups, sautés, scrambles and other entrées served at prominent North Coast and Peninsula diners and restaurants.

Patrons who have eaten a meal containing mushrooms at, say, Blue Scorcher, Street 14 Coffee, Astoria Co-op Grocery, Pickled Fish at the Adrift Hotel and Astoria Coffeehouse & Bistro in recent years may well have enjoyed a specimen from Williams’ unofficial one-woman business, All Wild.

“She’s just kind of like a gypsy. She comes in with a basket of goodies from her little car and offers us some,” said Jim Defeo, the owner of the bistro, who has known Williams for about eight years. “She’s been a great part of the restaurant community.”

Williams lives close to the earth, content to spend hours in the soil.

“I have picked in pouring down rain, and I don’t care,” she said. “You know what? When there’s mushrooms, I don’t even notice the rain.”

During a recent mushroom hunt — which took her to the private driveways of second homeowners who gave her permission to pick on their property — Williams stumbled upon a chanterelle bonanza in a shaded forest between Long Beach and Ocean Park. With the growing season almost over, the discovery came as a “happy surprise,” she said.

“My adrenaline is going wild!” she cried, slicing through stems and emitting her high, merry laugh. “All I can say is, we’re sh–house lucky!”

Many people wouldn’t know where or how to look; they would scan the brush and move on, blind to the feast at their feet.

“You have to have mushroom eyes. That’s all,” she said, gathering her loot and preparing to clean them with a cloth. (Those “mushroom eyes” can spot a roadside mushroom while cruising by at several dozen miles per hour — a skill Williams passed on to her grandchildren.)

Satisfied with her haul, she removed the most obvious traces of her presence, loaded the bounty into her hatchback and drove off, thanking Mother Earth.

When she takes rookie foragers into the woods for private lessons, she tells them: “Leave it the way you found it. You don’t trash it. You don’t upturn the moss and leave it there.”

Normally, she would sell the fresh loot to her clientele and take home the remainder to dry or pickle, which, along with her other edibles, she calls “money in the bank. For Williams, though, gathering mushrooms has never been about making money.

“I do it for fun. I only do it for fun, because I enjoy it. The money is extra; it’s a bonus,” she said. “I’d do it anyway.”

Williams, who emigrated with her family to Oregon in 1949, remembers feeling stunned at how many different varieties of mushrooms she could find in the state.

“All I knew from Hungary was the king mushroom, the big one. That’s the only thing we ever picked,” she said. “My god, there are so many mushrooms!” She started out by selling mushrooms to ethnic restaurants near Portland and managed a restaurant in Tokeland for five years.

Her books — “Coastal Bounty: A Guide for Gatherers” and “Woodland Bounty: Mushroom Delights for Gatherers & Gourmets” — sell well locally. At the Blue Scorcher, they don’t last long on the shelves, Hughes said.

A member of the Mycological Society of America, Williams said she has picked mushrooms in every state in the union except Texas, and in British Columbia. “That’s how I learned,” she said.

David Campiche, owner of the Shelburne Inn in Seaview and one of Williams’ former students, shares her abiding love for all things natural, healthy and wild.

“She is eccentric in a wonderful way: She’s all herself, and that’s a hard thing in the world, to be eccentric when all the pressure from cellphones and social media have kind of overtaken everyone,” said Campiche, a friend of Williams’ for about 40 years. “She hangs onto something that’s a little Old Europe.”

“She just likes to be active and alive,” he added, “and ‘alive’ is maybe the best word you could pin on her.”

Even if she doesn’t collect anything worth eating or selling, Williams feels her time outdoors is well spent. “I had my woods for the day,” she said. “I’m happy as can be.”