Champignons de Paris
In Search of Subterranean Mushrooms at Champignonnière Des Carrières
Good evening, friends,
We’re safely back in the states after our India trip and an extended layover in Paris. Aside from breaking up the nasty travel from India to the US, a layover in Paris seemed fitting because part of my mom’s side of the family comes from France and I knew the country had a deep affiliation with mushrooms. Unbeknownst to me, it would also be Valentine’s Day during our time there. A tough draw. Had I known in advance, perhaps I could have located some ancestral heritage in Saudi Arabia or a former Soviet state. Somewhere a little more emotionally sterile.
The good news is we ended up with quite a Valentine’s Day adventure. Ciara might have had machinations about dinner reservations and flowers, but even better than that I treated her to a labyrinthine navigation of Paris’s public transportation in search of a special type of mushroom.
I did a little research in advance of our layover (I googled “Paris mushrooms”) and found out that there actually was a very interesting history around mushrooms with that very namesake, or “Champignons de Paris” as they say. These are the same edible mushrooms we call button mushrooms or portabella (Agaricus bisporus), but they are grown in the abandoned limestone quarries that were mined to build Paris.
If you’ve been to Paris or seen photos, one of the most distinct aspects of the city of lights is the uniform architecture throughout the city. These iconic buildings - from Notre Dame to the Louvre - are all made from Lutetian limestone (Lutetia was what the Romans called Paris), which was mined right under the city and in the surrounding valleys. These quarries later served as the burial grounds for around six million people whose skeletons now reside in the catacombs, and in a similar state of decay they were also home to hundreds of mushroom farms.
L’histoire des Champignons de Paris
Champignons de Paris were first cultivated by French gardeners in the gardens of Versailles for King Louis XIV (1643-1715). He had a preference for the mushrooms, which at the time were called “rosé de prés” (pink of the meadows) due to their color. Particularly, the color of the gills are a light pink when the mushroom is young. Popularized by the King, industrious French farmers soon realized the empty caves under their city would be perfect for Champignon de Paris production.
The actual transition into the quarries is a little murky but the idea began percolating while the quarries were still active limestone mines. Horses which were used for extracting the limestone would drop their manure near the entrance of the quarries and mushrooms would grow from these dung piles. The spores would have been in the dung already, ingested by the horse, or could have possibly landed on the dung post-excretion. An informal mushroom cultivation began with workers piling the dung together and harvesting the mushrooms, but cultivation wasn’t possible year-round due to the colder temperatures of the winter months.
It wasn’t until one industrious farmer - Monsieur Chambery - realized that if they brought the dung further into the cave where the temperature was consistent (~15°C or 60°F), and the humidity higher, they could start to cultivate these mushrooms year-round. In the 1800’s, when limestone began to be phased out for cement, out moved the miners and in moved the mushroomers. At the end of the century, the Pasteur Institute was able to isolate sterilized cultures of Agaricus bisporus which really allowed for cultivation to flourish.
At the height of Paris’s mushroom cultivation, there used to be as many as 600 mushroom farms operating throughout the abandoned quarries. Even as recent as 1960, there were over one hundred producers in the Paris region, alone. Now, due to global competition and more modern cultivation practices, only nine producers remain in and around Paris and only five of those still grow mushrooms in an abandoned quarry.
Our Journey into the Mines
It would’ve been sweet if I did all this research beforehand, maybe even translated some questions to French to ask the farmer when we got there, but unfortunately that’s not how I operate. I did reach out to the farm’s page on Facebook and they sent me the owner’s number, but when he wasn’t on WhatsApp my research died there. I figured I’d take my three years of high school French along with my boyish charm and things would kind of just work out.
We got there right when the farm opened at 2:30pm after walking the twenty minutes uphill from the train station (they’re only open 2:30pm-5:30pm on Friday and 11am-12pm on Saturday). You walk about fifty feet into the cave entrance which is haphazardly decorated with old signage, informational placards, and discarded equipment, and come upon the fresh mushroom stand. The owner, Angel Moioli, was working the stand and triumphantly did not speak a lick of English - at least to us. He’s done a few other news hits - and even paid for a feature in Bon Appetit - but today he didn’t seem to be in the mood.
“Photo?” I inquired as I mimed toward deeper in the caves. He responded with what we interpreted as “if I take you back there then who will work the stand and serve the customers? Not being able to speak French, all I could say is touché. “J’escrit un blog” and showing him pictures of log grown shiitakes on my phone was just not cutting it. This guy was cut from the same stone as the caves he farmed. We bought a quarter kilo of the blond Champignons de Paris and a quarter kilo of shiitakes and went on our way.
Not to be deterred, we thought we’d go to a cafe, get wifi, translate a few sentences, and return a little more prepared. The issue was we weren’t in Paris anymore. We’d grown accustomed to a boulangerie every two blocks or so, but the town of Evecquemont had one artisan chocolatier (sans wifi) and that was it. Great chocolate, though, the house-made truffles were to die for.
Not to worry, we could still walk to the town over. Le Paradis, which does indeed translate to “the Paradise”, appeared to have more of a downtown per our grainy, half-loaded map on the phone. Certainly, there would at least be somewhere we could hook up to wifi for a few minutes. Well, an hour walk on muddy footpaths revealed that Le Paradis was just a community of large, sterile apartment buildings and kids riding their dirt bikes in the street. No cafes, no restaurants to be seen. It may be discomforting to hear but I’m here to tell you that there is no public wifi in Paradise.
We had come all this way and needed to at least give it one more shot. We walked all the way back to the Carrières and sat on a bench outside until there weren’t as many customers in the cave - we were hoping to get Mr. Moioli one on one again. With trepidation, we eased into the cave’s entrance and then loitered there while we formulated a game plan. Customers kept coming and going so we just tried to read a sign and not look weird.
Kids under 21 will sometimes hang outside a gas station or liquor store and “Hey Mister” someone by asking anyone going into the store to buy them booze. I’ve only heard of this practice, of course, but this is what it felt like idling at the entrance. I didn’t want to harass any of Mr. Moioli’s customers so we just kept staring at the placard and waited for the right opportunity to approach. Fortunately, opportunity approached us.
A generous Frenchman on his way out pointed at the sign and said something about how there used to be a lot of mushroom farms in the region, but now this was one of the last farms in operation. He was much more enthusiastic than Mr. Moioli and we used broken French along with miming gestures to help translate our plight.
We explained how I was a mushroom grower from New York and I wanted to see the setup here, but we needed someone to help us ask. He was eager to assist and brought us over to Mr. Moioli. After a tense couple minutes of negotiations, and everyone getting laughs off at our expense, our translator was able to chisel a crack in Mr. Moioli’s hard exterior (limestone is actually pretty soft as far as rocks go). Our translator stood guard at the stand as Mr. Moioli quickly whisked us through the large barn doors and further into the deep recesses of the caves.
He led us through a series of turns, dipping behind makeshift tarp walls, and flicking lights on as we went further and further. We could feel the temperature and humidity rising. We were whisked behind one last tarp et voila! A cavernous grow-room filled with large, wooden, double-decker mushroom beds.
The substrate used is “compost” which from my understanding is sterilized organic matter (not just the horse manure of the past). The compost clumped into little mounds but if you rubbed it between your fingers it was a very fine, light brown, and uniform compost. The compost gets dropped off at the farm weekly, as the one thing I was able to understand Mr. Moioli explain was that they produce 450 kg of mushrooms a week. Each bed can produce four flushes of mushrooms before the substrate needs to be swapped out.
A lot of French producers would also top the beds with gypsum (calcium sulfate, which they could get directly from the caves themselves) to help with water retention for the compost. That didn’t appear to be the case here.
We were back there for just a few minutes but it was an incredible experience. It all happened so fast that we didn’t even get our generous translator’s name, but I do want to thank Mr. Moioli for making our Valentine’s Day (I like to think he speaks perfect English and will read this, he just didn’t want to deal with our nonsense that day). If you’re ever in Paris, it’s worth taking the trek out to Champignonnière Des Carrières for the best Champignons de Paris you’ll ever have.
On the train home I could smell the mushrooms as they sat in the bag next to me. One of the other unique aspects of growing mushrooms down there is that the mushrooms will adopt the scent of the cave. The aroma of this particular cave was a light, earthy, musk - pretty close to dirt - that imbued a nice odor and flavor to the Champignons de Paris. It’s atypical of button mushrooms to have much odor or flavor at all (especially those suffocated in plastic that we’re used to at the grocery store), so this was a real treat.
If traipsing around the French suburbs on Valentine’s Day wasn’t enough, Ciara then had the distinct pleasure of cooking the mushrooms we’d purchased for dinner when we got home. We started the mushrooms with a dry sauté to let them sweat a bit, and then added a little butter, salt, and pepper. She had the mushrooms top a tagliatelle pasta with sauteed leeks in a Roquefort blue cheese cream sauce. A delicious meal and a perfect end to an unorthodox Valentine’s Day.
All in all it was a fun adventure to wrap up our two week trip. I’m inspired and eager to really dive into a full year of mushroom education and activities. I’ll be at the New York Winter Fungus Festival in two weekends on 3/1. I’m also doing an event with Wave Hill Gardens in the Bronx on 4/25, I’ll have more information on that next week.
Au revoir,
Aubrey
Bonus French market mushrooms:
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Cette aventure est tellement incroyable!! Love the storytelling. Love your diligence. Thanks for this. Going to send along to some French friends.
Love imagining you and Ciara’s vday 2025. ♥️