Mushroom memories

Did you inherit any weird tastes from your family? One of the oddest things "passed down" to me is an unhealthy suspicion of mushrooms. I didn't eat them growing up, and until recently, I thought my mother hadn't either. We asked my nani once if she liked mushrooms, and she said that she never knew what they were when she was younger (and no). 

When my grandparents decided to build a house in the Himalayas in the late 1960s, there were wild mushrooms to contend with. These could be poisonous and risky, so my great-grandmother was naturally stressed about this particular dietary adventure that I presume was communicated to her. 

In this letter from 1970, my great-grandmother writes, "I always feel nervous about you'll eating mushrooms anyway & more so now when Vindri [wrote?] there is also poisonous grass on your mountains above you all & I think the men gather the mushrooms thereabouts. Please do be careful about this darlings better to do without it." 

Upon further investigation (me asking probing questions based on the contents of this letter), my mom remembered that she did, in fact, eat some mushrooms during her childhood – the wild morels that grew in the mountains of Himachal, cooked with onions in a gravy. She didn't particularly like them. 

These are some of the wild mushrooms (turkey tail?) I saw growing above my grandparents' house in 2016, obviously not edible, but so pretty! I still find eating mushrooms odd and squishy, and I'll usually pick them out of dishes unless they're chopped into minuscule bits. But I like their flavour. Go figure. My brother, it seems, grew into them too. 

It's interesting how things are passed down, though, because soon after I shared this story on my Instagram last year, my bua texted to tell me that their family had enjoyed mushrooms growing up. They weren't available in the market in the 1960s, but in the monsoon, they'd show up in the family plot in Patparganj, Delhi. "I didn't know about them till my mother told me," she added. "She also told me to be cautious due to some being poisonous. But she had a discerning eye and plucked the non-poisonous ones and cooked them." My dad, however, has no memory of this; he doesn't think he ate them often because they were expensive. He likes them, though, "if fresh and well-cooked." 

I never got to meet my dadi because she passed away long before I was born. But if I had, would I like mushrooms?