I fish about in the big clay hotpot in front of me with my chopsticks and manage to seize upon a morsel of thinly sliced, yellowish mushroom unique to the Yunnan province. As I lower the mushroom into my bowl, my China team mate tells me with utmost composure, “Many people have died from eating this mushroom in the past. Maybe about 2-3 people per year.”
What in the what??
We’re at a mushroom hotpot in the Guanshang district, in the southeast area of Kunming, and I learn that Yunnan is home to several hundred varieties of mushroom. Although hotpot is commonly found across China, mushroom hotpot is unique to Kunming. Mushroom season is from June to September, and my China team mates lament more than once during dinner that the frozen mushrooms we’re having now pale in comparison to having fresh mushrooms in season, which is when mushroom hotpot is all the rage in Kunming.
Because of the toxins in several varieties of mushroom, out hotpot here is closely supervised by a waitstaff, who cooks the most poisonous variety first, and then adds the others in at specified intervals. I don’t see a clock or a timer in the restaurant in sight, but our waitstaff hovers over us while our hotpot boils. We wait for a total of 18 minutes (I’m surreptitiously looking at my watch), after which I’m told all the toxins are removed, and it is safe for us to dig in.
The broth is an opaque black, and very flavourful. And I end up eating that deadly mushroom anyway, and find it really tasty. We try about 6 varieties of mushroom, none of which are familiar to me. Besides the deadly mushroom, the one that I find the most interesting looks like a variety of sea sponge. It is white and looks like a small fish net. I’m told it only grows near bamboo, and I find out after some internet hunting that its latin name is Phallus indusiatus. Heh. I wish I’d gotten pictures, but here’s something off the web that closely resembles what it looked like when served to us.
Besides toxic mushrooms, I learn that the people in Yunnan regularly imbibe other foods that even people from other parts of China would find unusual. In my time here, I’ve tried a variety of fried insects such as silkworms, bees and locusts, as well as deep fried baby birds.
The bees were extremely graphic – with heads, thorax, wings all clearly visible, which made eating them a little more difficult than the locusts, which had been fried to an indistinguishable blackish crisp.
But once I got past the mental hurdle that I was eating bugs (eeeeee!), I actually found fried bugs to be pretty tasty. That said, I’m not going to be in a hurry to eat bugs again.
It would be remiss of me to mention the amazing spread of food we’ve been able to try without also recognizing the efforts of our Yunnan hosts, who have been amazing and extremely hospitable. Despite working full time, many of our team mates have taken leave to bring us around Yunnan. Between the dinners organized by the university and the meals our Chinese team mates have taken us out for, we’ve not had to pay for many meals on our own. That has been an indication of the extent to which they see us as honored guests, and I understand that for them to do any less for us would be seen as extremely rude. It has been eye-opening, to be schooled in the Chinese way of hospitality, and we’re all eager to show them that our standards are no less high in the West, when it is our China team mates’ turn to come to Boston.