Review | A love letter to the land — and the bounty it offers
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Comment on this story Comment Each spring, Iliana Regan dreams of morels. When she reaches to grasp them, however, they vanish, and her hands clap together, empty. That Regan’s yearning for wild mushrooms penetrates her sleep should be no surprise. Foragers I’ve met over the years speak in rapturous terms of encounters with a growth of black trumpets or the perfect porcini, characterizing these finds as the purest rush. When Regan writes of her waking discoveries, her excitement is tangible: “The light caught the rippled edges of the morels. I adjusted my eyes like you do when looking at an autostereogram. First there’s nothing; then there’s everything.” Regan’s new book, “ Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir ,” is held together by mycelial architecture. Mushrooms connect her to her forebears. Great-grandmother Busia from a village in northern Poland used boletus to give czarnina, duck blood soup, the flavor of the forest. Regan spent countless childhood hours searching for wild