To conclude, few of them are good to be eaten, and most of them do suffocate and strangle the eater. (Gerard, “Herball”, 1597)
WILD mushrooms have always courted controversy. They can make excellent eating, but can also kill you. In some parts of the world they are prized for both their culinary and their medicinal properties; elsewhere they are still feared and associated with witches, serpents and all things vile. The Anglo-Saxon world, ever distinct in so many ways, has for centuries suffered from a particularly acute case of mycophobia (loathing of fungi).
Until recently. Even among Anglos, wild mushrooms are becoming wildly fashionable. From London to California, the goat's-cheese-and-sun-dried-tomato set has woken up to fungal possibilities. Smart eateries are putting peculiar mushrooms on the menu. Fortnum and Mason, an up-market London department store, recently held a dinner to celebrate wild mushrooms, accompanied by a magnificent window display of man-sized fantasy fungi. The dinner was a sell-out.
Shops in both Britain and America which a few years ago stocked only the familiar, and flavourless, white-capped cultivated mushroom (Agaricus bisporus) are beginning to offer an exotic variety of fungi. The price tags are also exotic. At Dean and Deluca, an American delicatessen chain, sales of wild mushrooms are going up by 30% a year, and customers are clamouring for more. This year's novelty, the wild blue-foot mushroom (Lepista saeva), proved a runaway success. In Britain, even the big supermarkets are often now selling small, expensive packets of unfamiliar mushrooms from the wild.
Fungal infatuation is, of course, a culinary trend; but might it also be a cultural one? Might it signify the poking of modernity into one of the last dank cupboards of the primeval Anglo-Saxon mind?
From a mythic point of view, eating mushrooms is rather like kissing a snake. If they are not standard field mushrooms, they must be toadstools, dank, slimy and probably poisonous. They are a pallid, parasitic sort of thing whose fungal relatives infest your feet. They often grow in weird fairy rings, far too rapidly for comfort, and mostly at a time of year when other things are dying back. Professor Roy Watling, the head of mycology at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, says that in past times they have frequently been linked with the devil. Bracket fungi emerging from trees are still known as “conks”—a word that also means a large and twisted nose. Could it be the devil's?
Fleurs du mal
English and American literature alike have carefully nurtured this image of death and decay, evil and black magic. In the 19th century, Shelley described in his poem “The Sensitive Plant” a neglected garden:
In Lewis Carroll's “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland”, published in 1865, Alice encounters a creepy-crawly giant caterpillar sitting on a mushroom. He tells her:
Not the kind of thing to encourage anyone to make friends with fungi. Little wonder that in 1887 W.D. Hay, in his book “British Fungi”, called the British fear of fungi “so deep and intense a prejudice that it amounts to a national superstition.”
Elsewhere the prejudice is not shared. In continental Europe, where wild mushrooms have long been loved and avidly collected, people are by no means blind to their dangers: sales have traditionally been carefully regulated. Most continentals, however, would rather collect their own than buy them, keeping their favourite spots a carefully guarded secret. French mushroom-hunters, if in doubt, can take their finds to the local pharmacy to have them identified.
Many avid mycophiles are found in Eastern Europe, and particularly in Russia, where mushroom-picking is a national obsession for town-dwellers and country people alike. In past centuries fungi provided a source of protein for starving peasants, who collected anything that might be remotely edible. Russians still pick a much wider range of fungi than most westerners would feel safe with. A dish of mushrooms is more than bodily nourishment: it is food for the Russian soul.
The most mycophilic continent of all is Asia, where fungi are widely appreciated. Both China and Japan have used them for thousands of years, both for food and for medicine. As those countries have become more crowded and urbanised, much of the habitat for fungi has been destroyed, so now most of the commercially important species are cultivated. However, the biggest favourite with the Japanese, the pungent matsutake or pine mushroom, has resisted domestication, and is having to be imported from Korea and America's Pacific north-west.
Pick your poison
From this breathless and incomplete ethnomycological tour, it is clear that in many cultures mushrooms have been, and remain, far more than just an ancillary source of food. Perhaps oddly, the Bible makes no mention of them, but there are many references in the writings of ancient Greece and Rome, and the first known picture of a mushroom can be found on a wall painting in the ruins of Pompeii. Pliny assumed that fungi turned poisonous because they grew in unwholesome surroundings, full of rusty nails, dirty rags and serpents' holes. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who was born around 460BC, describes medicinal uses for fungi and also refers to a case of mushroom poisoning. After treatment to induce vomiting, the victim, a young lady, made a full recovery.
The Emperor Claudius was less lucky: his wife Agrippina is thought to have killed him with a dish of Amanita caesarea, a bright orange-coloured mushroom that was much in vogue in ancient Rome (and is still considered a great delicacy in modern Italy). This mushroom is so distinctive that there is little chance of confusing it with a poisonous variety, but Agrippina, anxious to ensure the succession of her son Nero, is said to have added the juice of the deadly poisonous death cap, Amanita phalloides, to dispose of Claudius.
Today the sorts of wild mushrooms sold in shops and served in restaurants should generally be above suspicion, so the main hazards are fungi that people collect for themselves. Some enthusiasts do seem to approach mushroom-hunting with an alarming degree of insouciance. The reason they usually get away with it is that only a relatively small minority of the common species are poisonous, and only a handful are lethal.
Most field guides go out of their way to emphasise the dangers, and to describe in lurid detail what might happen if you fail to heed the warnings. They exhort you not to rely on the appetising appearance or smell of an unknown mushroom, or tests involving silver coins, or the fact that the specimen has been half-eaten by slugs or rabbits or squirrels: human digestive systems are different. The only way to tell an edible mushroom from a poisonous one is to learn to identify it.
There is thus a lot to be said for getting to know the half-dozen potentially lethal species. The first kind any novice should know about is the death cap and a couple of its close cousins. In Europe and North America this mushroom is responsible for the vast majority of fatalities. The amatoxins it contains are so potent that a single cap is enough to kill someone. It is quite awe-inspiring to come across a group of them growing in the woods, looking so clean and wholesome, and reflect that they could be serial killers. Their poison is insidious: the victim feels no ill effect until 8-12 hours after the fateful meal, by which time irreparable damage may have been done. After bouts of severe abdominal pain, diarrhoea and vomiting for a day or two, the patient will feel better, but the symptoms will soon return, and a week or so later he may die of liver and kidney failure.
A mushroom with a different kind of sting in the tail is the common ink cap, Coprinus atramentarius, which is easily identified and perfectly safe to eat. However, consume even the smallest amount of alcohol within 72 hours of eating the ink cap, and you will feel like death. The mushroom has the same effect as the commercial drug Antabuse, which is designed to wean drinkers of their habit.
Those fun ones
The fly agaric, Amanita muscaria—the red-and-white spotted toadstool of fairy tales—is so well known that nobody would consume it by accident; but some will eat it by design. Among others, a writer called John Allegro, in his book “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross” (1973), controversially connects the fly agaric with an ancient cult that formed the basis of Christianity. The mushroom causes confusion and perhaps nausea, euphoric and manic behaviour, hallucinations and deep sleep. In the Kamchatka peninsula in Siberia, which is said to produce a particularly potent kind of fly agaric, the local population has been using them for centuries as a way of becoming, literally, intoxicated. Users include the local reindeer, which are said to become drunk and disorderly after feasting on the mushrooms. Afterwards reindeer and people may get a hangover, though fatalities are extremely rare.
The same is true for a larger group of hallucinogenic mushrooms that contain the toxin tryptamine, many of them belonging to the genus Psilocybe. These are the “magic mushrooms” of the swinging sixties, eagerly gathered by seekers after mind-altering substances. The vogue has abated, but plenty of people still experiment with them. They can produce euphoria and exhilaration, but might just as easily cause a bad trip. Moreover, many of the mushrooms in this category are small, brown and nondescript, making them easy to confuse with several poisonous kinds that are equally small, brown and nondescript.
Apart from the few highly toxic mushrooms, there are plenty of others that will give the unwary diner a nasty stomach upset. Moreover, a mushroom eaten with impunity by one person can cause great discomfort to another. And sometimes it takes repeated doses of something untoward before any effects show up. The brown roll-rim, Paxillus involutus, was considered edible until 1940, when a German mycologist, Julius Schaeffer, died after eating a succession of roll-rim meals. Nobody had realised that its effect was cumulative, eventually making it lethal.
As if those natural hazards were not enough, wild fungi also accumulate man-made polluting agents such as heavy metals and radioactive isotopes, making them potentially dangerous to eat even if the species is normally blameless. All these lurking dangers seem to confirm the notion that mushrooms are creepy and unreliable, and should be avoided.
And yet, these days, mushroom poisoning appears to be an extremely rare cause of death. Information is patchy, but in America data from regional poison control centres suggest that the number of suspected “incidents” involving mushrooms is usually well under 10,000 a year. Most of those who get into trouble are children, and only a few of them will need hospitalisation. On average there is probably less than one death per year—although in 1997 the Californian papers reported several separate incidents of poisoning by the deadly Amanita phalloides, including one death.
In Europe, where people may be eating more of the stuff, a survey of the Munich area in the ten years to 1985 recorded 516 cases of acute poisoning and 14 deaths. A study in Japan, covering the period 1959-88, identified 10,924 patients and 72 deaths. It is a fair bet that not every incidence of mushroom poisoning is documented, so the figures may be higher than they appear. But, by comparison, about 9,000 people die every year in America alone from eating contaminated food, say badly cooked chicken or hamburger.
Against these minute risks, consider the joys. It is a brilliant autumn day, perfect for a fungus foray. You step out, sniffing the air, searching for the scent of mushrooms. Your eyes scan the dead leaves, looking for signs of disturbed earth. You register that you are passing beneath oak and birch trees: good, some of the best fungi are linked to them below the ground. You bend aside the bracken and peer underneath. And there it is: a large, perfect Boletus edulis, with a bulbous stem and a deep brown cap. In your mind you can already taste it, sautéd with garlic and parsley. An innocent pleasure, with all the excitement of the hunt, but no victim. Underground, the mycelium is already marshalling its resources to produce the next mushroom.
Or, in the words of a famous haiku by Shiku, a 19th-century Japanese poet: