Drying, salting, and a shelf that has to reach May

By the end of September this kitchen smells of mushrooms for a fortnight and the question stops being what to pick. What matters from then on is what will still be worth eating in March, and how much of it there needs to be.

Collected: 24 March 2025
Written up: 11 June 2025
Locality: Varėna, Alytus County
Season: March 2025
Reading: 9 minutes
Parts: 4

Drying: thread, warm air, patience

Boletus dry beautifully and almost nothing else we pick does. The slices go onto linen thread with a needle, five or six millimetres thick, never touching one another, and the strings hang above the stove where the air is warm and moving. In good weather they are finished in two days. The test is not how they look but how they sound: a properly dried slice snaps, a nearly dried one bends first and then snaps, and one that folds over quietly goes back onto the string for another day.

An oven works when the weather does not, with the door propped open on a wooden spoon and the temperature as low as it will honestly go, which on our stove is about fifty degrees whatever the dial claims. Above sixty or so the flavour changes: the slices darken, and what you get in January is a soup that tastes faintly of toast. I check with a cheap oven thermometer sitting on the tray, because that dial has been wrong by fifteen degrees for as long as we have owned the thing.

Field marks

Slice five to six millimetres, and keep the pieces apart
Warm moving air beats hot still air, every single time
A dried slice snaps; if it bends and folds, it is not done
Store cold, dark and in glass, with the year written on it

Salting milk caps the slow way

Rudmėsės and the white milk caps get salted rather than dried, by a method old enough that nobody in the family can remember being taught it. Clean them, but do not wash them. Layer them in a crock with the gills upward, a good handful of coarse salt to each layer, a few blackcurrant leaves and a head of dill from the garden if anything is left standing. A plate on top, a stone on the plate, then the whole thing into the cold end of the cellar. Within a day the brine has risen over the plate by itself.

After that it is six weeks of doing nothing, which I find harder than it sounds. Every few days I lift the plate, look for anything that is not brine, and put it back down. If the level drops below the mushrooms I top it up with cold salted water rather than fresh, which was the first thing I learned here by getting it wrong. They come out firm, dark and far too salty to eat as they are; an hour in cold water, changed twice, brings them back to something you can put on a table beside potatoes.

The three winters I got it wrong

The first year we dried everything in the oven at whatever temperature had been set for bread, and the entire harvest came out brittle and brown and tasted scorched for the whole winter. The second year I sliced too thick, decided the pieces were dry because their outsides were, and put them into a jar. By December that jar had a grey bloom in it, and the smell when I opened it settled the question without any need to look closely. Both of those were impatience wearing the clothes of efficiency.

The expensive failure was a crock of salted milk caps in the third winter. I had moved it from the cellar out to the porch in November because the cellar was full, and the porch froze and thawed over and over through a mild December. The brine went cloudy and then went wrong. Ten kilograms of work went onto the compost at the bottom of the garden, and a rule went into the notebook in capital letters about cold, dark, and not moving things once they have settled.

Labels, order, and the audit in March

Every jar gets the species, the month and the year on a strip of masking tape, and the tape goes on before the lid does. It sounds like a small discipline and it is the one that makes the rest work, because dried boletus and dried larch boletes look identical by February and I have argued with my own shelf more than once. The standing rule in this house is that the oldest jar of a kind is the next one opened, whatever anybody thinks of the look of the newest.

In the last week of March I take the whole shelf down and go through it with a pen. Anything left over from the year before gets used first or goes; anything that has gone soft tells me that jar was never sealed properly; anything we never touched all winter tells me to make less of it next autumn. Two years running the answer has been the same, that we dry too many boletus and salt too few milk caps. It has not changed what I do in September yet, but it is written down.

Field marks

Species, month and year on the tape before the lid goes on
Oldest jar of a kind opens first, with no exceptions
One shelf audit in March, with a pen, not from memory
Whatever you never opened is the thing to make less of