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Blueberry endocarp/Photograph courtesy of Robert Rock Belliveau

Robert Rock Belliveau worked for years as a pathologist. He examined human tissues and tumors and he says he never tired of the job. “I would go to work and spend ten hours a day looking through a microscope. A couple of times a week, I would say to myself, ‘I can’t believe they pay me to do this.’ I just loved going to work and doing what I did.”

Belliveau continues to examine the world with his polarizing microscope. He’s turned his lens on paper, wildflowers and whatever he can get his hands on. Most often, he focuses on the incredible jungle found in fruits and vegetables. He has more than 2,000 images; two of which—cucumber and tomato trichomes—were recently featured in Science magazine. I talked with him from his home in Nevada.

How did you arrive at such a great enthusiasm for the microscopic world of food?

When I retired, I took a course in botany and I started looking at wildflowers. We had a couple years of drought—I’m out in Las Vegas—so I started looking for a more reliable source, which was going to the grocery store. I couldn’t believe the things I found on the things we eat every day. It’s like another planet. What intrigued me most is that these are things that we put in our mouth and chew up and swallow. We do it every day.

Do you go to the store specifically to shop for specimens?

Well, at first, I said, “As long as I’m shopping for groceries, let’s see what I can see.” Then, I started seeing these amazing things, so sometimes I would go to the grocery store just to find things to look at under the microscope. We have a Vietnamese and a Chinese market, so I began looking at exotic fruits and vegetables. Same thing there. I do it seven days a week. It’s not difficult for me to do. It’s a labor of love and I’m learning a lot about fruits and vegetables that I never knew about. I love talking about it. I talk to my wife about it. I talk to my friends about it. I’d stop people on the sidewalk to talk to them about it.

Corn husk with silk/Photograph courtesy of Robert Rock Belliveau

Tell me about your process. Once you’ve dissected a fruit or a vegetable, how do you go about searching for its compelling parts?

In the beginning, I didn’t know what I was doing. I said, “Let’s take a look just to see what’s there.” Every once in a while, I’d say, “Wow! I can’t believe it.” I began to learn that certain things—the pulp of an apple, the pulp of a pear, or the pulp of a peach—are, by and large, not that interesting. Occasionally, though, you’ll find something interesting, like the pulp of a kiwi. Last week, I was looking the skin of an avocado. I said, “Maybe it’s a waste of time to look at.” But it blew my socks off. After a while, you have a database of what you expect might see. Every once in a while, though, you just can’t believe what you see. It’s like Willie Sutton: You go where you think it’s going to be.

Are there particular hotspots?

The skin of a fruit or a vegetable. The endocarps. The seeds and the seed coat. Sometimes the mesocarp is bizarre. The leaves are sometimes astounding, particularly the under-surface of the leaf, which is a gold mine.

Has examining fruits and vegetables changed your eating habits? Is there anything that makes you not want to eat something now?

There are people in the Philippines, who eat certain fruits. The construction of their pulp has long fibers. If they eat too many of those, they get a bezoar, a coagulation of food, like a hairball in your stomach. They have to have surgery to remove them. There are two or three different fruits that do that same thing. If you want to eat those fruits, you should only eat one or two. We have cactus pads, like prickly pears, and those fruits have a lot calcium oxalate in the skin, which wear down your teeth; it destroys enamel when you chew on them. But the one thing I have sworn off is the skin of cucumbers. I lived in Japan for three years and they never eat the skin of a cucumber because of what they perceive as bitterness. What I can tell you, this has been a real education from me.

Red pepper endocarp/Photograph courtesy of Robert Rock Belliveau

"Squirrel Stewed"/Gulf City Cook Book, 1878

Last weekend, I attended the Cookbook Conference in New York. One panel of historians and scholars extolled the value of texts traditionally relegated to the basements and attics: community cookbooks. Recipes collected by churches, clubs, and occasionally hippie communes. These books occupy a middle ground between printed manuscripts and word-of-mouth recipes, said Sandy Oliver, the editor of Food History News and author of Saltwater Foodways. “They’re a little bit closer to what people really cooked.”

One of these collection—the Library of Congress’s American Church, Club and Community Cookbooks—includes an 1878 book from Mobile, Alabama entitled Gulf City Cook Book Compiled by The Ladies of the St. Francis Street Methodist Episcopal Church, South. As Alison Kelly, the reference librarian who curated the collection, said, “if you thought community cookbooks were just chicken croquettes, this book will change your mind.”

Compared to today’s cooking, some of the book’s recipes—turtle soup or terrapin stew, for example—reflect a changing Southern ecology. The recipes also serve as a document of a profound cultural shift: the decline of hunting, wild game, chitlins, and pig’s feet. Perhaps this is best exemplified by the utterly mundane treatment of squirrel. Take “Squirrel Stewed.”

Skin them very carefully, so as not to allow the hair to touch the flesh; this can be done by cutting a slit under the throat, and as you pull it off, turn the skin over, so as to inclose [sic] the hair. Cut the squirrel in pieces (discard the head), and lay them in cold water; put a large table-spoon of lard in a stew-pan, with an onion sliced, and table-spoon of flour; let fry until the flour is brown, then put in a pint of water, the squirrel seasoned with salt and pepper, and cook until tender.

The Joy of Cooking

For decades, squirrel remained one of the last holdovers of a wilder American cuisine. Even the venerable Joy of Cooking contained recipes for squirrel between 1943 and 1996—complete with a drawing of a boot holding down the rodent’s hide. What’s interesting about the 1878 recipe is that its unnamed author calls for the removal of the animal’s head—especially interesting given what may have been the final nail in the squirrel-eating coffin: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In an excellent 2000 essay, “Squirrel and Man,” collected in his book Noodling for Flatheads, Burkhard Bilger examines the medical hypothesis suggesting that elderly Kentucky residents who partook in the tradition of eating squirrel brains suffered from spongiform encephalopathy, related to “mad-cow disease.” While Bilger found that “mad-squirrel disease” probably did not exist, the threat—real or imagined—probably helped drive wild game out of our diet.

Recently, Heather Smith issued a call for the resquirrelification of the American diet—an effort to transform the garden-variety rodent into a “drive-through cheeseburger of the forest.” While that may seem somehow exceptional now, the Alabama community cookbook is a reminder that, at least in 1878, there was hardly anything extraordinary about stewing up a squirrel.

“Commune Gothic” Summer 1970. Heidi Bushell and Mike McCarty/©Renaissance Community Archives used with permission/UMass Amherst W.E.B. Du Bois Library

In the fall of 1970, Lucy Horton went to stay with Robert Houriet and his wife in Vermont. Horton learned to type and “made order out of the chaos” that would eventually become the book Getting Back Together. Houriet suggested that Horton write a cookbook. And so, after a brief stint cooking for a wealthy woman in Manhattan the following spring, Horton stuck out her thumb and began hitchhiking around the country to gather material. She visited 45 communes and collected dozens recipes for casseroles, couscous, chickbits and a curious soup that calls for Love.

Country Commune Cooking was published in 1972. The comb-bound book resembles earlier community cookbooks put out by clubs and church groups, except that its instructions sometimes contained an overt recipe for social change. I called Horton, who now runs Autumn Leaves, an online bookselling business in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to ask about the legacy of these commune cooks. “They were the forerunners of something,” she told me. “I went to a lot of places where people had what I thought were nutty ideas. But the basic idea was a diet based on what’s available locally, prepared nutritiously, getting away from meat and fat and sugar. That really has become a mainstream idea.”

Not every idea has been a lasting one, Horton said. “The recipes were all donated. I didn’t really own them. And people had a lot of notions about food. I couldn’t accommodate everybody’s notions.” If there were any notion she would forgo today, Horton said it would be what some communards then considered an insidious chemical toxin. “A lot of people thought that baking powder was a poisonous chemical, so I did all the baking recipes with yeast, which is difficult and not very practical.”

One of the most intriguing recipes comes from the Brotherhood of the Spirit, a commune in Western Massachusetts headed by Michael Metalica, “a youthful guru who in turn receives spiritual teachings from a medium, a retired bus driver” named Elwood Babbit. The Brotherhood (later renamed the Renaissance Community) was one of New England’s longest-lasting New Age communes. They tried to spread their message through rock and roll. Their recipe, too, is an attempt at communicating the group’s social and spiritual ideals through the medium of food.

Whether “Brotherhood Spirit in Flesh Soup” is emblematic of an era or more of a recipe for the future remains an open question. Either way, the collection reflects one of the most lasting legacies of counterculture. As Darra Goldstein said at the recent Cookbook Conference: “They were so much more than cookbooks. They were a way of being in the world.”

Warwick Kitchen, 1972. Meg, “Nutmeg” Rich stirring dinner, probably brown rice, squash or mashed potatoes./©Renaissance Community Archives, used with permission/UMass Amherst W.E.B. Du Bois Library

Brotherhood Spirit in Flesh Soup
From Country Commune Cooking, edited by Lucy Horton, reprinted with permission from the author.

Get everyone together and get a good feeling between you. Work out anything and everything that lies unexpressed. Realize that you are Spirit—and that the health and balance of those you feed depend only on your Thoughts—that balance and order of the body depend upon balance and order of the Mind Positive. The ingredients are of secondary importance, and always in a divine relativity. This soup was made by Alan, Martin, Tam, Lynne and others, and Duh Bear.

1. Two big pots half full of boiling water.

2. Add 2 cups of pinto beans and a little later several handfuls of barley.

3. To each then add a lot of sautéed onions. At this writing the soup isn’t done, but we’ll add 12 canning quarts of squash, carrots and tomatoes from last summer’s garden. Also some green beans someone gave us. Later some salt and seasoning, kelp powder, and a few tablespoons of miso to each. Follow your own Awareness most of all. This soup will feed 130 along with two pots of brown rice and two pots of millet. Pots are about 3 or 4 gallons.

Finally, one last ingredient to be used throughout—Love.

Thanks to Danielle Kovacs, special collections curator at UMass Amherst, for assistance securing permissions for the above photographs and also to Stephanie Hartman, whose article “The Political Palate,” provided inspiration.

Charles McIlvaine/Photographer unknown/Mycotaxon, 1986

In 1881, Charles McIlvaine, a veteran of service to the Union in the Civil War, was riding his horse near his cabin in West Virginia—passing through dense wooded areas blackened by fire—when he stumbled upon a “luxuriant growth of fungi, so inviting in color, cleanliness and flesh that it occurred to me they ought to be eaten.” He wrote, “Filling my saddle pockets I took them home, cooked a mess, ate it, and, in spite of the prophecy of a frightened family, did not die.”

That edible epiphany in the Appalachian wilderness initially supplanted an unvaried fare of potatoes and bacon, and it soon became an all-absorbing quest: McIlvaine would taste every mushroom he found. By 1900, he had tasted at least 600 species and established himself as an eager experimenter. (By comparison, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Annual Report of 1885 recommended 12 edible species.) In a letter to New York mycologist Charles Peck, McIlvaine wrote, “I take no man’s word for the qualities of a toadstool. I go for it myself.”

In 1900, McIlvaine published a richly illustrated, 700-page tome, One Thousand American Fungi: Toadstools, Mushrooms, Fungi: How to Select and Cook the Edible: How to Distinguish and Avoid the Poisonous. “It ought to be in the hands of all who collect fungi for the table,” one naturalist said. McIlvaine offers 15 pages of recipes for cooking, frying, baking, boiling, stewing, creaming and fermenting mushrooms, including advice from Emma P. Ewing (early celebrity chef and narrative-cookbook author). He exhibits a remarkable ability to stomach mushrooms considered poisonous (he’s sometimes known as “Old Iron Guts”), but what’s remarkable is that his extensive, idiosyncratic commentary mentions not only the natural morphological variations, but also the range of culinary possibilities.

Photograph by Huron H. Smith/One Thousand American Fungi/The Bowen-Merril Company, 1900

Consider the oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus): “The camel is gratefully called the ship of the desert; the oyster mushroom is the shellfish of the forest. When the tender parts are dipped in egg, rolled in bread crumbs, and fried as an oyster they are not excelled by any vegetable and are worth of place in the daintiest menu.”

Or the woodland agaricus (Agaricus silvicola): “It has a strong spicy mushroom odor and taste, and makes a high-flavored dish. It is delicious with meats. It is the very best mushroom for catsup. Mixed with Russulae and Lacterii or other species lacking in mushroom flavor, it enriches the entire dish.”

Or the vomiting Russella (R. emitica):  “Most are sweet and nutty to the taste; some are as hot as the fiercest cayenne, but this they lose upon cooking… Their caps make the most palatable dishes when stewed, baked, roasted or escalloped.”

Or even the parasitic jelly fungus (Tremella mycetophila): “Cooked it is glutinous, tender—like calf’s head. Rather tasteless.”

Photograph by James R. Welst/One Thousand American Fungi/The Bowen-Merril Company, 1900

Outside the ranks of today’s amateur mycologists (the North American Mycological Association’s journal is called McIlvainea), the man who explored the furthest frontiers of American mycophagy is little known. There is no authoritative biography, no major conservation organization named for him. In fact, as David W. Rose writes, McIlvaine endures “through—rather than in spite of—his brilliant eccentricity.” McIlvaine maintained a private home for the insane; he was partial to whiskey and sexual dalliance (eventually leading to his expulsion from Chautauqua); his busiest years were marred by a “housequake” of a divorce, including allegations that his wife poisoned him (truly curious for a man who ate mushrooms now considered poison). He died of arteriosclerosis in 1909, at age 68 or 69.

John Cage, composer and devoted mushroom eater, wrote, “Charles McIlvaine was able to eat almost anything, providing it was a fungus. People say he had an iron stomach. We take his remarks about edibility with some skepticism, but his spirit spurs us on.” (Also curious to note: Something Else Press reprinted McIlvaine alongside Cage, Marshall McLuhan, Bern Porter, Merce Cunningham, and Gertrude Stein.)

McIlvaine’s book endures as an attractive guide to anyone with the faintest interest in fungi, less as a primer for collecting or for lining your cellar with horse dung and more as a reminder to amateurs: in order to eat these species, you must know them well. His spirit inspires us to head out far beyond the supermarket’s insipid white button mushrooms, to where the wild things grow, for a taste of something that might make Old Iron Guts proud without our joining him in the grave.

Beatrix Potter/The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin/1903 by Frederick Warne & Co.

One of world’s largest and oldest living organisms also happens to be one of its least-respected. Nicholas P. Money’s most recent book, Mushroom, is something of a corrective and an enthusiastic outpouring for all things fungal—from a 2,400-acre colony of Armillaria ostoyae in Oregon to the supermarket’s white button mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus) right on down to the stuff that makes dandruff (Malassezia). In a testament to his passion, Money criticizes an amateur collector who’s removed a giant bolete the size of her head. “Why do people view mushrooms as so different from other living things?” he says. “Imagine, a meeting of the local Audubon Society that ended with the janitor tossing a sack of songbird eggs in the Dumpster.” Or whaling for research purposes.

Amateur mycologists foster a rare scientific partnership with professionals (a claim that perhaps only astronomers can boast of). Amateurs pioneered the study of mycology and the often-inseparable practice of mycophagy. One of these amateur mycologists was Beatrix Potter. She made careful observations of fungi and lichens, and her watercolors illustrate the 1967 British book Wayside and Woodland Fungi. Potter studied spore germination and wrote a scientific paper, but after being repeatedly snubbed—both for radical botanical views and because she a woman—she turned her attention elsewhere. Money writes:

Potter was, nevertheless, a pioneering mycologist, one whose intelligence and inquisitiveness might have been channeled into a career in science had she possessed the Y chromosome required for most Victorian professions. Fortunately, her considerable artistic talents gave her other outlets for her ambition.

Would The Tale of Peter Rabbit have been conceived had it not been for the biases of Victorian era science? Maybe not. In the paper “Bamboozled by botany, Beatrix bypasses bigoted biology, begins babying bountiful bunnies. Or Beatrix Potter [1866-1943] as a mycologist: The period before Peter Rabbit and friends,” Rudolf Schmid suggests that “her exclusion from botany has been said to have a direct analogy to Peter Rabbit being chased out of Mr. McGregor’s garden, that is, the garden of botany.”

Curiously, though, fungi rarely appear in Potter’s tales, and then mostly as a decorative or whimsical addition. Field mushrooms sprout in The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin; Agaricus campestris is a species squirrels collect, and elsewhere Potter noted their “nasty smell” and “good flavour.” The species also laid the groundwork for cultivated mushrooms and Heinz ketchup. It’s certainly one of the more subtle depictions of food in a genre rift with delightful donkey picnics and a champagne toast between mice.

As many hundreds of times as I’ve heard the story of Flopsy, Mopsy and Peter Cottontail, I never read it as a tale of enthusiasm for the natural world. Yet, at a time when animals are apparently falling out of favor in picture books (at least among Caldecott-award winners), I thought these observations made by an amateur naturalist were a testament to looking, you might say, where no one else had—towards the lowly fungi.