When it comes to edible vs poisonous fungi, the following generally applies...
* Very few fungi are poisonous enough to kill you.
* A few more will give you an upset stomach, but won't kill you.
* Quite a lot of fungi are just plain inedible, or indifferent eating.
* A surprising amount of fungi are edible and delicious.
The trick is to be very confident about the edible ones and the poisonous ones, and if in doubt, just play safe and leave well alone, because you might not get a second chance!
Giant puffballs are just such a HUGE giveaway. Count yourself lucky if you find one. The amazing thing is that they grow from a mass of underground fibres, and if you pick up a giant puffball, you might not even notice the hair-like thread that actually comes out of the ground. Picking one up is like picking up a ball from the ground! Take it home, slice it into 'steaks', fry it in any kind of flavoured fat (like bacon fat), until the outside is golden and the inside is like marshmallow... and enjoy!
By the way... the 'fruiting body' is the only part of a fungus that pickers are concerned with. The true mass of the fungus is always an enormous mass of fibres that penetrates deep into either the ground or different types of vegetation. Because no-one really takes much notice of this mass of fibres, it's only in recent years that anyone figured out how big they can actually grow. So, it's now reckoned that the largest living 'thing' on planet Earth is actually a honey fungus in the USA!
For anyone heading into the Cairngorms from Linn o Dee. At the moment, there are loads of Chantarelles in the wood directly opposite the front door of the old Derry Lodge. They are growing right next to the track. A nice addition to the pot.
That's a great news report, isn't it? Just a thought, but a little more detail on the offending fungi, such as names, habitat, a picture, would have been handy.
A couple of years ago I met a German couple on the Pennine Way, and they were amazed at how much fungi was growing. Back home, apparently, they'd have picked the lot and gorged themselves silly on it, but they weren't sure that the UK varieties were safe, even though they looked exactly the same as what grew in Germany. I offered them advice and confirmed several species were just the same as ones they trusted in Germany, but they still wouldn't pick them. Last I saw, they were buying mushrooms in the Co-op in Bellingham, but they could've had a truckload for free.
Years before that, I was walking with a group in Northern Ireland and there was a woman from Germany with us who stripped the woods bare of fungi as we finished a walk. Back at base, she cooked up an enormous mushroom stew, but apart from her, me, and one other person, no-one else would touch the stuff, convinced that they'd die an agonising death.
In the non-eaters defence, Paddy, I think it's fair to say that the eating of wild mushrooms can seem a pretty daunting prospect if you don't know your stuff.
A couple of weeks ago I came across a bloke who would eat wild anything!
Not joking... this guy was a keen shooter (well, poacher)... and he reckoned he should never shoot anything dead unless he was prepared to eat it. And he'd done some eating... fox (never again, tastes disgusting)... seagull (never again, too fishy)... hedgehog (apparently quite tasty baked the Gypsy way)... and he was telling me all this on a grouse moor, but strangely enough, he'd never shot a grouse.
The French have a great system wherebye every pharmacist is a qualified mycologist. Pick your fungi, take them to the local pharm and he'll sort them out for you.
Leaving Paris on one of the southern motorways we saw people picking loads of them, wait for it, in the central reservation. I reckon getting in and out was a damn sight more dangerous than anything they might eat!
However, we had a frightening experience several years ago when two French friends rented a cottage in the Lammermuirs and invited us down for the weekend. Debating what to eat the lady suggested a mushroom omelette would be nice and she'd noticed quite a few in a neighbouring field. Husband and I head down where he enthusiastically fill a bag with everything remotely fungal.
Eggs from local farmer. Omelette delicious. I remark, after extra helping, how good it is to have a Frenchman with us as we Scots are a bit suspicious of toadstools. "No No, says Madame, B--- has never picked a mushroom in his life , we thought you knew what they were"
Uncomfortable pause but we survived.
By the way, I've been eating St. George's mushrooms from a neighbours lawn since July. Delicious.
The late John Wyatt (former chief ranger in the Lake District) used to reckon you could eat a little bit of just about anything. Sure... a bucketful of the 'wrong' mushrooms could kill you, but a tiny nibble won't. I can't track down his exact comments, but John used to reckon that there were some curious tastes out there, regardless of how toxic they might be, and some tastes that were downright unpleasant and just had tobe spat out. John lived to a ripe old age and actually planted his own memorial tree long before he died. It was a yew, by the way, universally recognised to be poisonous!
I 'accidentally' tasted a millipede once, which had crawled onto the bite valve of my Platypus. Now, I'd always understood that the reason most creatures avoided eating millipedes was because they had an unpleasantly bitter taste. I can wholeheartedly confirm that they do. I'm not joking, that one bite was so horribly bitter that I spent the next five minutes furiously spitting, drinking, spitting and drinking, while wave after wave of nausea swept over me. Even half an hour later, the merest residual taste of the thing still had me gagging. So... remember... don't eat millipedes!
Paddy, I shall take your advice; millipede casserole is out although I bet Ray Mears knows how to cook them but Paddy, you're friend the ranger was wrong, and lucky not to be dead wrong. There are fungi growing in this country that are deadly. Amanita Phalloides, common name Death Cap only takes 20gms to kill a man. Amanita Virosa, Destroying Angel is another to avoid. Also the Panther. Trouble is, the symptons may not appear for some time and if you do not find a doctor or hospital that has specialist knowledge of this you are in deep trouble. Like dead. Even eaten cooked they are still fatal.
If you are going pickin' and you have your book with you, there is one reasonably safe parameter.
Most fungi are host specific and grow in defined soil and woodland type. So, if you find a fine plump field mushroom in a conifer plantation, walk on by, it's not what it looks. But the best thing is to go out with a group of mushie fans, preferably with an (old), expert and learn that way. Good day out too.
20g in terms of fungi that hardly tip the scales is quite a lot! A tiny nibble that won't even register on the scales is quite another matter. It's not as if it's plutonium, or something whose minimum 'lethal dose' hasn't yet been discovered.
I had collected wild field mushrooms in Scotland, but hadn't much experience of the art until moving to France. Since then I have been out a couple of times with very experienced French friends. On on occasion in the forest to the South West of Paris near Rambouillet, I managed to find a good carrier-bag full of cepes (including a few highly saught-after 'tete de cepes'). My colleague came back with about three sackloads and we managed to make cepe omlettes that catered for a team of nearly 30 Frenchmen. We also found girolles but as the rest of the team weren't entirely confident, we left them out.
Given that cepes go for between 20-80 Euros per kg in French markets, I reckon we had 150-200 euros worth of mushrooms.
I believe that the advice in a survival situation is not to bother with mushrooms. Their energy return is so low that they don't merit the risk of making yourself sick or worse. But if you can learn to identify even one or two varieties with an experienced picker, then it's a lot of fun and a culinary delight. And finding the dodgy ones (such as the dramatic colour-changing Devil's Boleat) can be intriguing too.
As for the magic variety, the jury is out. Are these toxic or just intoxicating?
