Budapest: free mushroom checks in the Fehérvári market hall

A desk at gate VI, and four addresses

BUDAPEST VÁSÁRCSARNOKAI Kft., the company that operates the city’s market halls, shopping centres and markets, examines mushrooms brought in by members of the public and gives advice free of charge — ‘ingyenes gombavizsgálatot és szaktanácsadást’ — at four of its sites: Vámház körút, Fehérvári út, Bosnyák tér and Kórház utca. In the Fehérvári hall the desk stands at gate VI, entered from Október huszonharmadika utca. On weekdays it works Monday 10:00 to 14:00 and Tuesday to Friday 08:00 to 15:00. Two of the four halls publish no hours at all and ask callers to telephone. The times come from the company’s own listing, and it is that listing the national food chain safety authority sends readers to.

Even the street name comes in two spellings. The inspection card gives ‘1117 Budapest, Kőrösi J. u. 7-9.’, while the company footer and the English hall page give ‘Kőrösy József u. 7-9.’; OpenStreetMap records Kőrösy József. It is one building, but a mapping app will treat the two forms as different streets.

One page, three answers about the weekend

When the hall itself is shut — ‘Zárva tartási időben (vasárnap, munkaszüneti nap)’ — inspection at Fehérvári and at Bosnyák tér runs from 10:00 to 18:00. Ask the same page about Saturday, or about when the season ends, and it answers three times over. The weekday row for Saturday reads ‘SZ ZÁRVA’, closed. The weekend block on the Fehérvári card puts Saturday back in: ‘Minden év május 1. – október 31. között (kedvező időjárás esetén meghosszabbítva, vagy szüneteltetve) szombat, vasárnap és ünnepnapokon’, from 10:00 to 18:00, 1 May to 31 October, extended or suspended according to the weather. The general paragraph, which names only Sundays and public holidays, limits the whole arrangement with ‘Csak május 1-e és november 30-a közötti időszakra vonatkozik’ — to 30 November, a month longer than the hall card allows. Whether anyone is there on a Saturday, and whether anyone is there in November, cannot be settled from the page, so a visitor should ring +36 1 273-3143 or +36 1 273-3144 first.

Inside that weekend window there is an end-of-day limit: after 17:30 staff can complete the examination of baskets brought by at most three people. It cannot bite on a weekday, because weekday inspection has already finished by 15:00.

It is worth reading who does the work. The company states plainly that its supervisors carry out the free inspection ‘munkaköri feladataik ellátása mellett’, alongside their actual job of keeping the halls and markets running, and warns in advance of longer waits or of being redirected to another site. This is not a staffed municipal inspectorate on the Zurich model; it is a service added to a market supervisor’s duties. The English hall page does name a senior supervisor for the building, István Csordás, but says nothing about who is at gate VI on any given day.

The power is to seize, not to certify

The page cites its own legal basis: section 5(2) of decree 107/2011 (XI.10.) and section 8/A(4) of act XLVI of 2008. A gomba-szakellenőr, a market mushroom inspector, may impound and destroy what is brought in — where the material is poisonous or judged unfit for human consumption, where unfit specimens cannot be clearly separated from the rest, or where a batch from a single collecting vessel contains the death cap, Amanita phalloides. The page adds that in practice a whole batch is destroyed when any species causing the same or a similar poisoning finds its way into the basket, and it names Amanita verna, Galerina marginata, Lepiota subincarnata and Lepiota brunneoincarnata. Separately, under decree 13/2001 (V.9.), a mushroom belonging to a protected species counts as unfit for human consumption and is picked out and set aside.

That is a power to take away and destroy. It is not a power to hand anyone a certificate that the remainder is fit to cook. People leave gate VI with a lighter basket, or with a conversation, and never with an approval.

Nor does the national food chain safety authority keep the list of inspection points. Nébih says only that the register of market inspectors is held by the Pest county government office, and refers readers to the operator’s site — still under the operator’s former name, Fővárosi Önkormányzat Csarnok és Piac Igazgatósága.

Eight cases, and the day they are out of reach

On the hall’s top catering level, at the corner of Október 23-a utca and Fehérvári út, stand eight glazed cases of mushrooms preserved by freeze-drying. The operator’s description explains that the fruit bodies are separated by habitat — pine forest, broadleaved woodland, grassland, species that typically appear only in spring — and laid out among grass tufts, pieces of wood, leaves, twigs and mosses, that pictograms in the top left corner of each case distinguish edible, inedible and poisonous species, and that every specimen carries a small board with its Hungarian and Latin name. In the photograph on this page, the pictogram is in fact printed on the individual label, beside the names. The display has been there ‘több, mint 15 éve’, more than fifteen years. It is not a museum: the page names neither a curator nor a founding year, and the byline Abrudán Barbara belongs to the author of the page rather than to whoever built the cases. Freeze-drying is not decorative here; the same page notes that the Hungarian Natural History Museum holds a substantial collection of fruit bodies preserved the same way.

Admission costs nothing, but only ‘a vásárcsarnokok teljes nyitva tartási idejében’ — during the halls’ own opening hours. On a weekday that is no obstacle: the hall trades from 06:30 to 17:00 on Monday and to 18:00 from Tuesday to Friday, so the desk and the cases fit comfortably into one trip, albeit through two entrances at opposite ends of the building. The trap springs on a Sunday or a public holiday, which is exactly when the desk keeps its longest hours. The trading hall is closed, the English hall page carries a separate warning that the hall does not open on public holidays, and the exhibition is simply unavailable. The building does not fall entirely silent: the CBA supermarket on the lower floor and the flower shops trade from 07:00 to 14:00. Saturday, meanwhile, appears twice on that page and differently — 15:00 in the opening-hours block, 16:00 in the footer.

What this address does not promise

The company also publishes the windows outside which truffles may not be sold in its halls, and those are best read with the Latin names in view. The table’s ‘fehér szarvasgomba’ is Choiromyces meandriformis, permitted from 10 June to 22 October, and not the Italian white truffle Tuber magnatum, which the same table lists separately as ‘isztriai szarvasgomba’, from 1 October to 7 January. Rendering the first as ‘white truffle’ would merge two rows and two organisms.

What language the conversation happens in is also unstated. The operator’s website has an English version; the inspection desk makes no such claim, and no page says that anyone there speaks anything but Hungarian. Nothing here amounts to advice about what may be eaten, either: the species named above are simply those whose presence costs a collector the whole basket. The one thing a visitor can check without asking anyone is behind the glass. In a single case labelled ‘Réti gombák’, meadow mushrooms, Marasmius oreades and Clitocybe dealbata sit in the same case of dried grass, the latter marked with a skull. They grow in the same grassland, and the operator calls its specimens ‘élethű’, true to life. That much is on view without asking; the rest stays with the inspector, whose power ends in destruction rather than approval.