For many years, there was a week-long ‘mushroom madness’ in Moscow. Why? 

And although they also sold other Lenten products there - fresh and salted vegetables, for instance, the main product was mushrooms of all types and varieties. Their popularity is easy to explain: the product is filling and very cheap.

“Here was everything necessary for ‘saving the soul’: salted milk mushrooms, porcini mushrooms, pickled honey mushrooms – in huge vats and tubs; there were open barrels with sauerkraut, with pickled cucumbers, soaked apples, with peeled peas. What wasn't there! Radishes, potatoes and all kinds of vegetables. Dried mushrooms of various qualities hung in long threads and garlands along the walls of the tents and on the shafts raised above the sleighs – white and yellow, as well as cheap dark birch bolete,” wrote writer Nikolai Teleshov about the market.

Mushrooms were brought from everywhere, but primarily from the “mushroom provinces” – Ryazan, Olonets, Kostroma. There, their harvesting was put on a grand scale, with entire villages engaged in the trade. Having collected the mushrooms, the locals cooked, pickled, salted and dried them on the spot. And, by the beginning of Lent, countless tubs with crispy goods and “beads” of dried mushrooms were sent for sale.

The mushroom market in Moscow was open for only a week, but people stocked up there for the entire duration of Lent. That’s because mushrooms could be used to make soups, as side dishes, appetizers, pies, added to salads, baked with other vegetables, etc.  

The artist Konstantin Korovin recalled in his memoirs: “There were sleighs with village horses standing in a row, with large barrels on them. Men in sheepskin coats shouted: ‘Mushrooms, mushrooms! Cabbage, pickled cucumbers!’ Huge barrels with cucumbers, milk mushrooms, saffron milk caps, red caps, white caps. Vasily and I could barely push our way through the crowd!”