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“North American mushroom hunters are an unusually bold, curious, even iconoclastic and bizarre bunch,” mycologist David Arora wrote in the preface to his 1991 pocket guide “All That the Rain Promises, and More.” The book’s cover might as well be an advertisement for the mycophilic misfit’s way of life: It’s a portrait of a man, grinning mischievously, dressed in a tuxedo, a trombone tucked under one arm, his hands full of mushrooms, looking as though he’s a band member who has escaped a wedding to gather his stash in the woods.

Journalist and amateur mycologist Eugenia Bone, 62, has counted herself among those bold, curious and bizarre outliers. Except “outliers” no longer seems an apt description. Twenty years later, Arora’s guide is likely to find a wider audience, and Bone has edited “Fantastic Fungi Community Cookbook,” which should appeal to them. Released at the end of last year, it collects recipes from many of those former outliers and a few regular-Joe newcomers who have discovered the pleasure of scouting for mushrooms and cooking with them. Taken as a sample of these erstwhile eccentrics and latter-day enthusiasts, the community of the cookbook would seem to accurately represent that of the larger whole. Who it includes is as telling as who it leaves out.

Mushrooms, in case you hadn’t heard, have been wholeheartedly embraced by the dominant popular culture. You might say they’re mushrooming; just look at how frequently they were listed on trend forecasts for 2022. Holiday gift guides suggested we say it with kits to grow our own at home. The wellness industry has put mushroom powders and tinctures — touted as adaptogenic and appropriated from Eastern medicinal traditions — into as many products as it can persuade people to buy. They’ve spread to high fashion; barely two weeks ago, in the luxury label’s return to New York after 20 years, the Alexander McQueen Fall 2022 collection came wafting down the runway. It was titled “Mycelium.” The theme should be obvious. (Even if the leather was not made of mushrooms, which is also a thing now.)

Scientists and academics have collectively begun to regard them as a legitimate subject suitable for research, publishers are investing in related work, and movies are being made. Maybe the most influential was Louie Schwartzberg’s 2019 film “Fantastic Fungi,” also referred to as “The Mushroom Movie.” Known for his nature documentaries, the director and cinematographer trained his camera on the unseen “mysteries” of the mycelial kingdom, and on the face of the American fungal furor: mycologist, entrepreneur and speaker Paul Stamets.

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Thanks to chef René Redzepi of the renowned Noma in Copenhagen and his acolytes, foraged ingredients are revered in food circles — held in even higher regard than farm-to-table ingredients, or organic produce procured from the greenmarket, fungi being one of the more obvious of the prized finds.

Bone has observed an increase in numbers among the mushroom-curious ranks. (The New York Mycological Society, for one, is now double the size of last year, she said. The former president of the organization, she lives in New York City and remains a member.)

“The community has always been kind of radical,” she said. “Now, you could be hunting in the woods with your mushroom club, and you could have an investment banker on your left and the plumber on your right, but there’s always been a certain radicalness to their interest.” The “Fantastic Fungi Community Cookbook” doesn’t convey that countercultural spirit, but it does give you a sense of the passion and commitment these “hunters” have for the object of their pursuit.

“There is nothing jaded about this book,” she said, contrasting it to the plenitude of “really good forager chef cookbooks out there.” What she believes makes the book special “is that these are the recipes that people actually make who hunt mushrooms,” instead of those created by professional recipe developers, meaning, “these recipes came from kitchens, not from the necessity of a book.” So, she said, “it’s not precious; it’s absolutely — it’s from the earth.”

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The idea to do a cookbook was initially Schwartzberg’s; Bone proposed a community effort. She attributes his positive response to the fact that he “sees mycelium as a metaphor for community unity — that we do better when we help each other,” and she considers the communal element a reflection of the same principle.

She tapped her own contacts (some of them chefs) and put out the word through the message boards of local mushroom clubs. These organizations hold mycophagy events — forays (as mushroom foraging outings are officially referred to by participants) and classes. Bone also saw the potential in the larger “Fantastic Fungi” film audience and put a recipe-sharing platform on the documentary’s website to cull more submissions.

The book’s publisher is Insight Editions, the same one behind the 2019 collection of essays edited by Stamets, titled after the movie. Its 59 contributors are spread across the United States, Canada and Britain, and their collective 108 recipes cover a broad and varied range of mushroom dishes that feature different varietals. “A great number of them were tested 30 times by their authors, the home cooks,” Bone said. “They’ve been making them forever.” (She tested every recipe at least twice and shared a few of her own, in addition to writing the essays scattered throughout the book.)

Dorothy Carpenter, who at 72 calls New York City home, is a member of multiple mushroom clubs and a person of many “vocations and avocations” — psychologist, musician and circus member. She remembers foraging with her family around their country farmhouse on the bluffs of the Missouri River in Weldon Spring, Mo., 30 minutes west of St. Louis, when she was younger. They scouted morels in spring, grapes for jelly, hickory and hazel nuts cracked on rocks in other seasons. Nowadays, in December, in the wake of an errant warm spell, she sometimes finds large pockets of offseason pleurotes — oyster mushrooms — there that would usually emerge in late summer or fall.

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Over email, she relayed that she chose to feature them in her contribution to the cookbook because she admires their good, hearty flavor that, unlike more delicate chanterelles or morels, can’t be overpowered by emboldening ingredients such as garlic, onion or sherry. She combines them with the fortified wine, along with heavy cream, and serves them on toast.

When Olga Katic was a toddler, she picked some mushrooms in the field beyond her family’s house in Bosnia, and after she ate them her mother stuck a spoon down her throat, so she would vomit them, just in case. Katic was not deterred. She spent the rest of her childhood chasing porcini and morels. Forty years later, at age 44, she lives in South Carolina, where she founded a mushroom farm with her husband. She’s most excited about the cookbook’s recipes — hers is one for duck eggs with mushrooms — and its photographs, taken by Evan Sung. Though fungi have become her profession, she hasn’t lost her love for tracking them. “It still feels like a hobby,” she said via email. “It is the factor of surprise, the glee that overcomes you when you see a specific mushroom you are looking for, or not looking for. I am giggling while I write it.”

An enthusiastic participant in SCUMS (the South Carolina Upstate Mycological Society), Katic also created a mushroom club for women because, she wrote, “over time, being in this business, I was seeing that there was not enough support for us women in the field. And I wanted to create a space where we could support each other.” She has noticed plenty of female mushroom hunters — foray leaders, identification experts, authors and teachers — but not many cultivators or entrepreneurs. “I am seeing that women just don’t have as much courage, maybe, because we are overshadowed, or rather looked at as inferior,” she said, emphasizing that this had been her experience and that she couldn’t speak for everyone.

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She wasn’t speaking for Alexis Nikole Nelson, 29. The longtime forager from Columbus, Ohio, hasn’t seen many women out and about on the mushroom gathering circuit. She pronounced the country’s regional mushroom clubs “very male, very White,” repeating the phrase twice for effect. “Mycological societies and forays scare the crap out of me. I’ve done, like, one, and I was like, this maybe is not the group setting that I am built to be doing this with,” she said. “That has been my experience both with a single in-person foray and in just being in the Facebook groups for a lot of these fungi groups, as well.” If you start looking beyond mushrooms into the Facebook groups for foraging, in general, she has found a little more gender diversity. “But I still don’t see it getting that diverse in terms of race, which is pretty heartbreaking.”

The lack of diversity is the primary reason Nelson named herself @BlackForager on her Instagram account; that’s also the bio line she chose for her TikTok account, which has more than 3.4 million followers. When she began researching foraging and seeking out those who share her practice online, she was greeted with that White, male demographic, one that clearly didn’t include her. “I just really wanted people to know, they were learning from my page, they were getting that information from a woman who is Black,” she said. Her hope is that her content reassures anyone else who felt left out of the foraging crowd “that their interest in this space is valid, and is also worth celebrating and that they are welcome at this table.”

She is not among the community featured in the “Fantastic Fungi” cookbook. If you follow her work, you can begin to make sense of the fact that you might be hard-pressed to find Black contributors to projects like this. (While Bone stated, via email, that although “she wasn’t privy to anyone’s racial identity until the publishing party, unless they mentioned it, or their name implied as much,” she couldn’t think of any Black or Indigenous contributors. But, she added, “that doesn’t mean there were none.”)

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In her content, Nelson has addressed the historical context for the long-standing racism that has resulted in the exclusion of Black people from the current dominant culture of foraging and discussed the subsequent erasure of their legacy in that field. It speaks, she said, to the erasure of the greater Northern American legacy of foraging in favor of promoting a Western European point of view.

“Traditionally, the mushroom clubs were full of people who hailed from mycophilic places, like Asia, Northern and Eastern Europe [but not England], Russia,” Bone said. That statement would suggest North America was not a mycophilic place and would seem to support Nelson’s point. So might Arora’s earlier assertion about the countercultural tendencies of mushroom hunters, which seems to overlook the fact that, for millennia, there have been people on this continent for whom mushroom hunting is not a kooky recreation.

M. Karlos Baca, 46, a Diné and Nuchu Indigenous food activist in Mancos, Colo., was not surprised to learn that his community or its legacy doesn’t seem to be represented in Bone’s cookbook, either. He has been collecting mushrooms since he was 14 and has “harvested literally hundreds and hundreds of pounds of them.”

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As far as he’s concerned, the whole mushroom-as-trend phenomenon is just another example of the “cultural misappropriation” that White people take part in “on a daily basis,” and that includes the commodification of mushroom gathering as a leisure practice. When he looks at it, he said: “All I see is continued colonization, and the fact that people that still have no roots in this place after being here for 500-plus years are still trying to figure it out. And when our people are outlawed from even gathering in the majority of our sacred places, from gathering in our traditional homeland, and have been severed from our connection to what makes us Indigenous to the space, and we have to look at this trending of this thing, it’s just a big middle finger.”

He saw that middle finger in Schwartzberg’s movie the moment he watched Stamets display, as Baca described them, “his stolen mushroom effigies from the Maya people” on screen. Based in Olympia, Wash., Stamets, 66, who also contributed a recipe to the “Fantastic Fungi” cookbook, adamantly responded to the claim via email. “My plan is to return to a Mesoamerican (Mayan) center who can care for them. I am seeking a recipient who can respect and protect them. I did not ‘steal’ any mushroom stones,” he said. “I am protecting them so they can be returned. This is my destiny. And is in my will.”

But for Baca, the middle finger is all-pervasive. He sees it in American books that mention Indigenous usage of mushrooms in the context of Western anthropology and archaeology. He rejects the term “forage” because of the way those disciplines have employed it to paint his people as desperate scavengers, “when the reality is that we cultivated and maintained these continents as we do all relatives,” he said via email.

Make the recipe: Sherry-Creamed Mushrooms on Toast

Instead of dwelling on the insult, Baca has started hosting his own forays for participants who are Black, Indigenous or other people of color. He’s also empowering Indigenous people to share their knowledge among themselves. He’s one of a group of writers at the helm of “A Gathering Basket,” another community cookbook, but this one is made by and for his community. It’s a multimedia, digital book that’s published serially with poetry, art, videos and photography — and recipes. Coincidentally, the final section of 2021 was all about mushrooms. “It’s a cookbook in name, but it doesn’t follow the Western format of a cookbook. It looks more through the Indigenous lens of what food warfare has done to Indigenous people,” he said.

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Nelson has a book of her own expected at the end of next year: a seasonally directed guide with recipes that gives weedy or invasive plants their close-up. Because she’s an avid mushroom gatherer and cook, it will have plenty of ideas for what to do with that ingredient throughout the year.

In the meantime, the community represented by that of hobbyists in the “Fantastic Fungi” cookbook does have appealing recipes to inspire and feed you. Carpenter’s fancy-seeming but ultimately homely — and easy — oyster mushrooms on toast is among them. It’s a place to start.

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