Chancing across a puffball big enough to feed a village, Abi Andrews considers scarcity and excess.

I’m not entirely sure what fields they own, but Poppet seems to know. She’s a pleasure to walk; a well trained gun dog. She brings me her ball and I throw it again for her. She is endlessly forgiving of my feeble wrists. If she misses where it lands, usually because she overshoots it, she uses her nose to find it. A pointer, perhaps because when she’s on the wrong trail, I can point to it, and she follows the sight of my finger, honing in on the ball like a missile. Likewise when she smells the quarry, she points her nose at it, which is the origin of the breed name. I’ll point to the game you point to the ball; we might understand each other’s pointing, I fancy that reciprocity.

We cross through another gate and I see it. Glowing there near the edge where the nettles start. It sticks out against the grass. Never in my life have I seen one but I am immediately sure of what it is as I approach it, creamy white and obscene in the grass – a giant puffball. It makes me think of a fatberg I found washed up on a beach in Scotland a few years back, a white lump of lard the size of the barrel that used to contain it, surfaced from a shipwreck that sank 100 years ago – both ineffable white lumps thrown from some beyond space. A fat slug is lolling inside a crater it has chewed around itself, on the puffball’s mass, which looks like a moon with all its pockmarks.

I crouch down next to it, stroke it over. I know it’s edible, and I know I will eat it, because I can’t help but roll it from its delicate anchor to the earth, and it comes loose like a hot air balloon tethered by a string, rising up to greet me like it wanted to be plucked, harvested, taken. I roll it in my hands like a beach ball. I bring it up to my nose and inhale deeply. Yes, it smells like a mushroom. Poppet doesn’t seem at all attracted by the smell. She ignores my offer to join in the inhaling of the bounty. Maybe she is too deeply conditioned to practise restraint around quarry, her breed manipulated out of its impulses, but what do I know? We march it back to the house.

I place the puffball gently onto a thick wooden chopping board and situate it where it invites regard, while I think of what to do next. When H comes downstairs, I ask her if she slept well, because the house is a little bit spooky and we both feel unnerved, here, in this big house with all its rooms without an obvious function. I wait for her eyes to fall on it but they don’t, so I ask her if she notices anything different about the kitchen. She clocks it, and in one breath she asks wasthattherewhenyoucamedown, as though the spooky house might have produced it, like in some Olga Tokarczuk fable.

I found it in the field. What the hell is it? It’s a giant puffball. Is it edible? Yes it is. It looks like a brain. 

Now we must find out how it is to be eaten. It sits there all day, looking solid and expectant, a downed meteor in the corner of the room, while we work on our laptops, moving from room to room as the fancy takes us, fiddling with the thermostat, trying to turn it down, as it keeps every single room, including ones that look like they are never used, warm to the point of lethargy.

When it comes time to prepare it, the puffball commands some ceremony. We are both silent as I make the first cut like an executioner bringing down my sword on a noble’s neck. It makes a squeaking sound, making it suddenly less noble, more outlandish. It is like cutting through memory foam, and inside is gloriously white, and the piece falls away with a soft thud. I press my finger into its squidgy density, expecting it to spring back like an imprint on a foam mattress. But instead my finger stays outlined there, each individual ridge of fingerprint visible. On the unblemished white of its inside, my fingerprint looks like vandalism. I want to take it back.

I cut several more thick slices and then I cut these in half. These pieces I dip in flour, tap off, dip in beaten egg, dip in breadcrumbs, and drop into a frying pan swimming with oil on the Aga. When she was first showing me around, the homeowner stood in front of the Aga speaking about its merits, and I, trying to impress on her the ways in which I would not be excessive with her utilities (I’ll just put on a jumper!), said that I wouldn’t fire the Aga up to cook, that I’d probably just use the gas hob in the second kitchen. She blinked at me. You don’t fire the Aga up, the Aga runs all the time. Like the ambient thrum of the central heating, the Aga chugs away, indifferent to my intentions. There is a parallel feeling, between being hot in a t-shirt indoors when it’s frosty out, and having to talk myself out of cringing to put a tray with a single beetroot inside the chamber of the Aga to roast, when usual habit is to conserve, to be frugal, to restlessly attend economies of scale: warm the person not the home, jacket several potatoes at once, for future meals.

When both sides have browned I bring the crumbed piece out with tongs and lay it on a plate. We look at it. You first, H says. She says, I’ll try it but I’m a bit wigged out by it. I cut a corner, sniff it, put it in my mouth. When I chew down the density is gone, my teeth find each other easily. It collapses like marshmallow, and there is only a very subtle taste, like mushroom tea. Water seems to ooze from the flesh of it, but the fried breadcrumbs are crunchy and masking. It is surprising and a little disappointing that such a smell that filled the room doesn’t translate to a strong flavour. I watch H while she takes a bite. It’s not a centrepiece, we decide. A receptacle, for other flavours. Like the way the flesh took my fingerprint.

We reason I may have cut the slices too thick. So I return to the flesh and cut the next slices much more thinly, to about a centimetre, before crumbing them and placing them in the pan. This time, I press down on the slices with a spatula to squeeze out that foamy structure. Once nicely browned, I pile them up on a plate, and drip lemon over them. With the tart lemon, the earthly flavour of the mushroom breaks through, and the texture, compacted, has a more satisfying chew. Its elephant-ear shape has me in mind of breaded plaice, a similar umami beneath the bitter.

We found the house through a house-sitting website. We had two months to fill between rentals, after moving on from a sublet where we had been temporarily sharing a bedroom. Now we are temporarily in this extremely comfortable house, a double bedroom each, with central heating we won’t be paying for. How lucky are we? How good is this? How nice are they, how trusting, to let two strangers stay in their home for several weeks with only the expectation of walking their well-behaved dog twice a day and putting off burglars?

The puffball on the chopping board is not much reduced, but I am full of it for now. H has confessed that she does not really like to eat the puffball, doesn’t want to try any more, it weirds her out too much. I’m sorry, she says. It’s the brain thing. I place it on its newly flat side, on a plate, and slide this into the fridge. It is clear that it will yield many meals. I feel a pang of anxiety at my ability to make use of this gift from the underground, in a race against its decay. It feels immense, like a hock of gammon for just one person.

The house owner needs the sitter because they are elsewhere. They are usually on holiday, this time at the family holiday-home in the south of France. They hope to save on kennel fees, and ensure less disturbance for their pet. The sitter needs the house sit because, by and large, precarity. You can see it as a retreat, and H and I pitch it to each other this way, a nice writer’s retreat while we are between two rentals. But ultimately the exchange depends on instability, on some of us not having a stable place of attachment, because a person with a place of attachment isn’t likely to up-sticks to another house, often somewhere out-of-the-way, to look after a stranger’s pets, for free. Usually, there are stipulations such that the pet can’t be left for more than a few hours alone.

In the house-sit of the online matching service kind, you are inside a stranger’s home. Their descendants might be on the mantelpiece, their ancestors might be painted and set in gilded frames on the wall. Their homemade jams labelled in the cupboards. Their post coming through the door. If you have guests over, who wander around with you aghast saying how much does it cost to heat this place, you might feel like keeping it a secret from the homeowner because the etiquette is unclear. Lots of things are unclear, like whether it’s okay to finish the fancy bottle of olive oil, or if help yourself to food extends to the stash of Fortnums chocolates.

The next day, I again make up the thin breaded slices, but this time I layer them in a baking dish, over which I smother a tomato sauce I have simmered from canned tomatoes and garlic, then a healthy grating of hard cheese, before layering again with the same. I put this in the Aga to bake. This time, I am excited about how it tastes and regretful that H is away for the night, leaving me unable to redeem the puffball for her. It’s so delicious it distresses me: there is no one to share in this triumph with me, alone at this huge kitchen table. And I still haven’t eaten half of the puffball. It will be breaded, baked puffball for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

This fevered consumption doesn’t feel like the way it should be. A puffball, I realise, is a whole village event. I should be sharing this bounty with friends and neighbours. But the first time in my life I encounter it, I am in the countryside in Norfolk where I have no friends and no neighbours. And I feel a responsibility not to waste a single mouthful of puffball – this being for me a once in a thirty three year event – at the same time I am opening windows to try to let out some of the heat from this roasting building. Likewise, a whole village could live in this house – we could be several potatoes getting jacketed at once. It all smacks so much of a certain kind of economics; an interaction between scarcity and excess. That some have so much while others don’t, has, in a roundabout (or structural) way, resulted in my landing a feast for a village on my lap, without a village to share it with.

Is it cynical to feel that our precarity is being exploited so that some can uphold extravagant lifestyles? It’s free rent! Shouldn’t we be grateful? I don’t think so. I think of Natalie Olah’s provocation to steal as much as you can. By the Wildlife and Countryside Act, it is illegal to forage wild plants and fungi without permission of the landowner. The enclosure of our commons has severed us from our relationship with this sporadic, anarchic abundance, which used to guide us in the renewal of reciprocal community ties. As the proverb goes, the best place to store the grain is in the belly of your neighbour.

In our final week in the house-sit, Poppet and I find two more giant puffballs, tucked away on the homeowner’s private field. This time, Poppet leads me to them, perhaps recognising them as interesting to me. They might rot there, never fulfilling their potential to bring people together. So I resolve to liberate them. When I leave I will smuggle them back to the city, to be shared there among friends.

*

Abi Andrews is a writer from the Midlands. She has published a novel, ‘The Word for Woman is Wilderness’, and is currently working on her second.