Most people who live here know this the way you know a fact about your hometown: vaguely, without much thought, mentioned mostly to out-of-towners at parties. I was one of those people for a long time.
I’ve spent the past 30 years around food - in restaurants, in food production, in the parts of the industry most people never see. Nothing develops a thick skin like working in the food service industry.
My wife and I love to host - I cook, she decorates, we plan the wine (and drink) together.
I love watching cooking shows and when I find a good restaurant I try to recreate the experience at home using my own twist on the ingredients and flavors.
About three years ago we had lunch at a local restaurant and my wife ordered this Portobello mushroom dip. We paired it with one of our favorite wines - a Willamette Valley Pinot. I didn’t expect much since mushroom dip growing up was a mushy and bland experience (somebody pass the ritz cracker topping). To my surprise the dish was amazing. Just the right amount cheese, al dente mushrooms, and cooked perfectly.
True to form (and every aspiring cook) I came home and experimented with it till I got it right - let’s just say my kids were sick of mushroom dip by the end of it.
The key to the dish was - you guessed it - Pennsylvania Portobellos. That’s right, the mushrooms right in our back yard. Firm, meaty, and ready to drink the butter and garlic in this dish.
Psst - in a later post I’ll post the recipe now that fall is upon us!
At some point - in between episodes of old Jacques Pépin PBS episodes - I started wondering why there wasn’t a real place online for any of this. Not a farm’s individual website, not a recipe blog that happened to mention mushrooms, but something that actually took seriously the fact that I live inside one of the more interesting, under-told stories in American food. A whole industry, largely invisible, sitting a few miles from my house.
So I bought the domain. PennMushrooms.com. It felt a little ridiculous typing in my card number for a website about mushrooms, and it still does, a little.
I will be honest about how much of this I did not know how to do. I do not have a background in web development, and I learned that the hard way, repeatedly, in public, mostly through a GitHub Pages setup that broke in ways I did not know websites could break. There was a stretch where my own blog page returned a 404 error for reasons that took an embarrassing amount of troubleshooting to track down, and the eventual answer was “the internet cached the fact that the page didn’t exist yet, before it existed.” I don’t fully understand how that’s allowed to happen. But it got fixed, and the site stayed up, and I kept going, mostly out of stubbornness.
The real test came at the Kennett Square Mushroom Festival. I’d built a whole plan: recipe guide as a free download, a badge on the homepage, the works. I talked to over fifty people that day. Told them about the site, told them about the recipes, made what I thought was a reasonably good pitch. I got one new subscriber.
One.
I won’t pretend that didn’t sting a little, standing there afterward doing the math on 20 conversations and one signup. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized the number wasn’t really the point - I’d handed fifty people a URL and asked them to remember it later, which is close to the hardest possible way to ask someone to do something. The people were interested. The mechanism was bad. Those are different problems, and only one of them is actually a problem with the idea.
So that’s where this is, honestly. A guy who cooks a lot, lives in the right place, bought a domain name almost on impulse, and is now slowly, imperfectly, building something around a fact most of his neighbors already knew and never thought twice about: that this unremarkable-looking stretch of Pennsylvania farmland quietly feeds a huge share of the country’s mushrooms, and almost nobody outside it has ever heard the story.
I’m Luke, and I write about mushrooms on the internet.
If you want to follow along — the farms, the people, the recipes, whatever I get wrong next — join the club. I’ll actually see the signup this time.