Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/209310
I n the Blue Hills south of Boston, where the woods are just thick enough to hide the city's skyline and drown out the din of passing cars, you will not see chef Daniel Bruce. You will not see him ambling around chestnut oaks and white pines in search of the 28 edible mushrooms he can identify by sight and smell. Or dropping to his knees and brandishing a kitchen knife to retrieve one of these mushrooms from the roots of a dying tree. Because the first rule of being an expert mushroom hunter is not to be seen. That is unless he chooses to be, as is the case today. "If we ever got lost in here, we'd walk out 20 pounds fatter," the chef says, courteously holding back a branch from smacking me in the face. "There are more things to eat in the woods than you could ever imagine." The morning sun is trickling down through the fall canopy, scattering puzzle pieces of light on the ground, which Bruce seems to be patching together with his eyes. Wearing jeans and white New Balance sneakers, he hardly looks the part of an outdoorsman revered for his encyclopedic knowledge of wild mushrooms. Yet as we climb deeper into this world of decomposing limbs and leaves, Bruce's sixth sense for foraging explodes. He begins breaking trail with long, powerful strides, bounding up molehills and down gullies, through thickets of tangled thorns and muddy bogs. He moves with agility surprising for his six-feet-one-inch build, a rare crossbreed of Squanto and Sasquatch. This is the Daniel Bruce few get to see, away from his stainless steel domain at the Boston Harbor Hotel, where he has served as executive chef since 1989. "Each species of mushrooms likes to grow in different areas," Bruce explains, poking two fingers into a decaying stump and examining its broken-down bark. "I mean soil acidity, the type of tree, altitude. Then you have to know what time of year they grow—like right now, we have four or five species we could find. It's all legwork after that." Indeed, Bruce's mushroom IQ represents decades of legwork. Each mushroom in his repertoire he has collected, cut, put under a microscope, and studied alongside Audubon books and foraging guides. This is how he spent his childhood in the backwoods of Maine—far from four-star restaurants—where he grew up with no electricity, no running water, no indoor toilet, and certainly no television. Bruce's father was (and still is) a registered Maine guide who fled the "rat race" of a town of 500 in New Hampshire to a town of 56 in Maine. Still considering it too crowded for his liking, he then moved his family a mile and a half down the road, effectively taking 10 percent of the town's population with him off the grid. "I was a junior prom baby," Bruce says. "My mom was 16 and my dad was 17 when they had me, so my parents were sort of like [my] brother and sister." With their annual income around $5,000, the Bruce family of six lived largely off the land. Young Daniel was sent to school with sack lunches of local pickerel sandwiches. "We had to lug our water in from a mile away," he says. "It was a pretty unusual upbringing, but it was fun. I loved going into the woods and finding these things. It was like a treasure hunt." Every day he foraged for pussy willows, alder berries, fiddleheads, wild raisins, ramps, and later in his teens, mushrooms of all kinds. "I'd bring all this wild stuff to the table, but none of my family would want to eat it, except my sister," he says, "and she's still alive, so it was all good." T oday's target is a mushroom called Hen of the Woods, which, Bruce tells me, grows at the base of oak trees this time of year. While each mushroom has a Latin designation with which the chef is well-acquainted, their layman's names sound more like characters from The Lord of the Rings, ones you could also start seeing if you eat the wrong kind of mushroom. Velvet Foot, Pig's Ear, Man on Horseback, and Bear's Head Tooth are just a few of the 5,000 mushrooms in North America that foragers will crawl through poison ivy to eat or identify. "I'm not a mycologist; I'm a bounty hunter," Bruce says. "I know the mushrooms I like to cook with, and that's what I go for." None of the mushrooms he forages, however, end up at his restaurants due to health codes. They are strictly for friends and family. As we descend deeper into the woods, Bruce spouts survival tips and fun forest facts, just like how I imagine his father must sound when guiding clients on the hunt. "See this fiddlehead fern? You can use it to wrap a fish and keep it fresh," he says. "And these pussy willow shoots—when they're very young, the inner bark can be boiled like pasta and eaten. There was a time when the outer bark was used to make tea." He tells me that the Hen of the Woods mushroom has been proven to limit or reduce the growth of tumors, and can reportedly enhance the effectiveness of chemotherapy. "A friend of mine had a brain tumor and he swears that part of the reason he got better was because I used to make him this little broth with Hen of the Woods," Bruce says. "That's the mushroom we're trying to get right now." "I loved going into the woods and finding these things. It was like a treasure hunt." 136 BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM 134-139_BC_F_Profile_Holiday_13.indd 136 11/1/13 5:00 PM