This is the dark horn of plenty. It grows under beeches and tastes good. This is the broad-brimmed hawk mushroom; it loses its bitter taste when blanched, and it's very good for you. This is a greenie, but it has other names. These are tree mushrooms; the trunks of alders and poplars are sometimes full of them, and they're good for flavoring soups. This is the cep, also known as the imperial mushroom. It stands alone. And it's good luck to find one. (The fly agaric shows you where to look.) This thin one is anise agaric; Grandmother used to pickle them in vinegar for the inspector of crown lands. This is orange agaric. They have crumbly, hollow stems, they grow under young pines, and they taste like veal. This beauty is a parasol mushroom. Everybody knows them. Fairy tales happen under their umbrellas. They protect you from the evil eye. If you eat them raw, they taste like nuts. This is the honey tuft; they grow in clusters. They don't come up until late fall, and they don't agree with everybody. Ink caps (very tasty) grow in the rubble along the monastery wall. Greenies are sandy and need to be washed thoroughly. And these here are morels; we string them like beads or spit them on thorny branches to dry, and then we flavor our winter soups with them. And these are the political mushrooms: the names are sulfur tuft, panther cap, destroying angel, and deadly amanita.
Autumn 1813. Sophie knew the time had come. For years she had been including revenge for her imprisoned Fritz in her evening prayers, just before the amen, but it took her a long time to decide what special ingredients she should add to the mushroom stuffing of her calf's head to
be sure of the effect. The panther cap wrecks the nervous system, often with fatal results. The sulfur tuft contains the poison muscarine, and so does the destroying angel, but in stronger concentration. The deadly amanita, which has a faint, sweetish smell and tends to grow under oak trees, destroys the blood corpuscles, but not until twenty-four hours later, when it has long been digested, or so one would suppose.
Sophie decided to use them all. Along with a basket of magnificent, almost maggotless imperial mushrooms, her cousin Lovise at the forester's lodge sent her the requested varieties wrapped in a knotted cloth. And because fly agaric acts as a stimulant, she put in two young, still bulb-shaped specimens. In addition, the Kashubian raftsmen, who were still carrying fugitives from the flooded Island to the besieged city, brought a basket of otherwise unobtainable sorrel and fresh parsley. As for the Westphalian calf's head, the kitchen squad had requisitioned it the day before. (All the butter, eggs, and Glumse had been taken by the Russians.) The calendar read September 26.
During the day the Prussian batteries in Aschbude and Schellmuhle had set the Dominican monastery on fire with red-hot cannon balls and Congreve rockets. Advancing from Ohra amid light musket fire, the Russians had attacked the outworks of the star redoubt. But Major Le Gros, who was one of the invited dinner guests, had thrown the Russians back with canister shot before they could reach the palisades.
Always when Sophie prepared a calf's head for Governor Rapp and his guests, either to be stuffed or to be served in sour herb jelly, she obtained as a by-product soup for her special boarders. Behind the governor's house on the Long Garden, standing white in the late summer shade of lindens and maples, beyond range of the allied batteries, the hungry children of the Wicker Bastion came crawling through the bushes, rattling their bowls.
After removing the cushions of skin, the fat cheeks, the embedded eyes, the ears, and the soft mouth from the bone with a short, sharp knife, after detaching the tongue, spooning the brains out of the split skull, stuffing the boned calf's-head casing with the precooked tongue, the brains, the
chopped onion, and the mushrooms cut in slices, and sewing it up, Sophie boiled the removed bones, in other words, the calf's upper and lower jaws, with barley and lovage until the bones were bare and the flat, deep-rooted molars as well as the long front teeth of the lower jaw were easily pulled. They looked nice. And with the thick barley soup, which she poured over the fence into tin bowls, Sophie gave the Wicker Bastion children long, fat calves' teeth, which were good for earache, gave you sweet dreams, protected you from flying lead, gave strength to your first, second, and third wish at the time of the full moon, and in general made for happiness.
Many years later, when old Fraulein Rotzoll was buried in the graveyard of Saint Barbara's, the mourners included several sedate ladies and gentlemen who still carried those calves' teeth as good-luck charms in their handbags or tobacco pouches. During the siege, they said — though none of the children wanted to hear about the siege — when hunger had settled in every neighborhood, when after the dogs the rats were eaten, when even human flesh (Cossacks who had gone astray on patrol) was sold in the market as pork goulash, a pound for twelve groschen, while horse meat was selling for eleven groschen, an angel — yes, an angel, though the city women called her "Rapp's whore" — saved us from starvation with her thick soups.
Sophie never gave the governor or his guests any calves' teeth. Every day Rapp had guests at table, sometimes few, sometimes many. In the years before the siege he received quite a few celebrities, such as Murat, Berthier, Talleyrand, the future prince Bernadotte. But he also invited selected city notables, to whom, after dinner, he served up the bill for their "contribution." On several occasions Pastor Blech had been the governor's sole guest. The two men got along nicely as long as the conversation revolved around the ifs and buts of the revolutionary years, Sophie's cookery, or most knowledgeably, the growing of roses.
After dinner Blech always submitted a petition for the pardon of his former pupil Friedrich Bartholdy, who by then was well into his second decade as a prisoner in the fortress of Graudenz. But Rapp rejected all petitions, alleging that
Europe must first be at perfect peace. As long as England failed to knuckle under, as long as Schill's bands were fomenting insurrection, as long as the emperor was being defied in the mountains of Spain and elsewhere, a pardon was not to be expected, for law and order must be demonstrated incontrovertibly. Rapp also gave the pastor to understand that the virginal pride of his cook, Sophie — since it was on her behalf that the pastor wrote his petitions — forced him to be hard. Yes, yes, why not admit it, he was mad about the obstinate creature; no fort had ever resisted him like Sophie. He didn't expect her to love him as she loved her imprisoned Fritz. But a man of his stamp couldn't be warmed by her everlasting "no." If she wanted her man back, she should just open up a bit for him, the governor. What he asked was only natural and would be fun for both parties.
Pastor Blech never came to dinner again after that. And Sophie, who wanted to keep her virginity for Fritz, stopped putting in her petitions. But it was only when Rapp had returned from Moscow and recovered from his frostbite, when the city was encircled and besieged by Prussians and Russians, when the people of the city were gouged, humiliated, exposed to the outrageous demands of the commissaires and (within plain sight of the still-banqueting French) to merciless hunger, that she made up her mind. In the early fall she wrote to her cousin Lovise and soon received, buried in sorrel, the desired ingredients: mushrooming hate.
Here's how we see her: still girlish, though, with her thirty years, old enough to be a matron. Head slightly tilted over the imperial mushrooms. Her peat-brown hair, plaited into a kind of bird's nest. Eyes close-set. Two vertical creases in her forehead underline her determination. An acute angle. Her nose. Her small mouth whistling kitchen songs. Now she cuts an imperial mushroom into slices from stem to cap. Not a one is discolored. How lovely they are. Silence in the kitchen. The whistling has stopped. Now she puts on her spectacles. Produces something from under the sorrel.